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YOUNG BENJAMIN FRANKLIN. 



'« But the vrork shall not be lost."— Passage from the Epitaph of 
..Benjamin Franklin, written by himself. 

"It's hard for an empty sack to stand upright." — Proverb from 
Poor Richard's Almanac. 




Rational Animals. — P. 156. 



Front. 



YOUNG ' BENJAMIN FRANKLIN 



Sljt P# Sosir tljrougb fife. 



A STORY TO SHOW HOW YOENG BENJAMIN LEAENT THE PRINCIPLES 

WHICH RAISED HIM FROM A PRINTER'S BOY TO THE 

FIRST AMBASSADOR OP THE AMERICAN EEPFBLIC. 



A BOY'S BOOK ON A BOY'S OWN SUBJECT. 

BY 

HENRY MAYHEW, 

AUTHOR OF M THE STORY OF THE PEASANT BOY PHILOSOPHER,' 

; YOUNG HUMPHRY DAVY," " LONDON LABOUR AND THE LONDON POOR,' 

"WHAT TO TEACH, AND HOW TO TEACH IT," 

"THE GREAT WORLD OF LONDON," ETC. 



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LONDON : 
GKIFFIN, BOHN, AND COMPANY, 

STATIONERS' HALL COURT. 
1861. 



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PEEFACE. 



It was Walter Scott who first raised liis voice 
against the folly of writing down to the child, 
saving, wisely enough, that the true object among 
authors for the young should be to write the 
child up to the man. As people talk broken 
English to Frenchmen, and nurses prattle the 
baby dialect to babies, so it was once thought that 
boys' books should be essentially puerile — as 
puerile in subject, and puerile in style, as the 
tales about " Don't-care Harry" (who was torn to 
pieces by a hungry lion, merely because he would 
persist in declaring that he "didn't care " about 
certain things in life), and such-like tender bits 
of verdure that used to grace the good old English 
Spelling-Books of some quarter of a century back. 
Conformably to the Walter Scott theory, this 
volume has not been penned with the object of 
showing boys the delight of slaying a buffalo 
or a bison ; nor yet with the view of impressing 
upon them the nobility of fighting or fagging at 
school. The one purpose of the book is to give 
young men some sense of the principles that 
should guide a prudent, honourable, generous, 
and refined gentleman through the world. It 
does not pretend to teach youth the wonders of 



Ylll rPwEFACE. 

optics, chemistry, or astronomy, but to open 
young eyes to the universe of beauty that encom- 
passes every enlightened spirit, and to give the 
young knights of the present day some faint idea 
of the chivalry of life, as well as to develop in 
them some little sense of, and taste for, the poetry 
of action and the grace of righteous conduct. 

It has long appeared to the author that the 
modern system of education is based on the fal- 
lacy, that to manufacture a wise man is necessarily 
to rear a good one. The intellect, however, is but 
the servant of the conscience (the impulses or 
propensities of mankind being merely the executive, 
rather than the governing and originating faculty of 
our natures) ; and hence the grand mistake of the 
teachers of our time has been to develop big 
brains at the cost of little hearts — to cram with 
science and to ignore poetry — to force the scholar 
with a perfect hot-bed of languages, and yet to 
stunt the worthy with an utter want of principle : 
in fine, to rear Palmers, Dean Pauls, Eedpaths, 
Davisons, Eobsons, Hughes, Watts, and a whole 
host of well-educated and hypocritical scoundrels, 
rather than a race of fine upright gentlemen. 
Society, however, seems to have had its fill of the 
mechanics' institute mania ; the teachy-preachy 
fever appears to have come to a crisis ; and, in the 
lull of the phrensy, the author of the present book 
wishes to say his say upon the means of worldly 
welfare, the laws of worldly happiness, and the 
rules of worldly duty, to the young men of the 
present generation. 

As to the handling of the subject, some ex- 



PREFACE. IX 

planation is needed. Uncle Benjamin, who is 
made the expounder of the Franklinian philo- 
sophy to the boy Benjamin himself, is not a purely 
imaginary character, He has been elaborated 
into greater importance here, certainly, than he 
assumes in the biography of his nephew ; but this 
has been done upon that Shakesperian rule of art, 
which often throws an internal moral principle 
into an external dramatis persona ; and as the 
witches in Macbeth are merely the outward em- 
bodiment, in a weird and shadowy form, of Mac- 
beth's own ambition, and have, obviously, been 
introduced into the play with the view of giving 
a kind of haunted and fatalistic air to a bloody 
and devouring passion (a passion, indeed, that if 
represented really and crudely, rather than ideally 
and grandly, as it is, would have made the 
tragedy an object of execration instead of sym- 
pathy — a bit of filthy literality out of the Eoyal 
Newgate Calendar, instead of a fine supernatural 
bit of fate, overshadowed with the same sense 
of doom as an old Greek play) ; even so, in a 
small way, has Uncle Ben here been made the 
exponent of the Franklin view of life, rather 
than his nephew Benjamin to be the first to con- 
ceive and develop it. Some may urge that, by 
this means, the genius of Franklin is reduced 
from its original, cast-iron, economic character, 
to a mere second-rate form of prudential mind. 
Nevertheless, there must have been some reason 
for the printer-ambassador's " Poor Eichardism ;" 
say it was organization, temperament, or idiosyn- 
crasy, if you will, that made him the man he 



X ; PREFACE. 

was ; still the replication to such, a plea is, that 
even these are now acknowledged to be more or 
less derivative qualities, in which the family type 
is often found either exaggerated into genius, or 
dwarfed into idiocy. Hence it is believed that 
no very great historic violence has been com- 
mitted here, in making a member of the Franklin 
family the father of Benjamin Franklin's character, 
even as his parents were assuredly the progeni- 
tors of his " lithiasis" , Moreover, Unele Benjamin 
was his godfather; and that in the days when 
godfathership was regarded as a far different duty 
(the duty of moral and religious supervision) from 
the mere bit of silver-spoon-and-fork-odand that 
it is now. Again, from the printer's own descrip- 
tion of the character of his uncle, it is plain that 
Uncle Ben was not the man to ignore any duty 
he had taken upon himself. Besides, the old 
man lived in the house with Benjamin's father, 
and had himself only one son (who was grown 
up and settled as a cutler in the town) ; so that 
as the uncle was comparatively childless, it has 
been presumed that the instinctive fondness of 
age for youth might have led the old boy to be 
taken with the budding intellect and principles of 
his little nephew and namesake, and thus to have 
exceeded his sponsorial duties, so far as to have 
become the boy's best friend and counsellor, 
loving him like a son, and training him like a 
novice. Further we know that Uncle Benjamin 
was a man of some observation and learning ; he 
appears also to have been a person of consider- 
able leisure, and perhaps of some little means 



PREFACE. XI 

(for we do not hear of his following airy occu- 
pation in America) ; so that when we remember 
how slight is the addition that even the pro- 
foundest geniuses make to the knowledge-fund of 
the world, and how little advance those who take 
even the longest strides make upon such as have 
gone before them, we cannot but admit that 
Franklin must have got the substratum of his 
knowledge and principles somewhere — since, born 
under different circumstances, he would have 
been a wholly different man. Surely then there 
is no great offence offered to truth in endeavour- 
ing to explain artistically how Benjamin Frank- 
lin became the man he was; nor any great 
wrong done to history in using Uncle Ben as 
the means of making out to youths what was the 
peculiar " Old Bichard " philosophy that distin- 
guished the printer-sage in after life. The main 
object was to give the young reader a sense of 
the early teachings Benjamin Franklin when a boy 
might have received (and doubtlessly did receive) 
from his old Nonconformist uncle, and accordingly 
the latter has been made, if not the virtual hero r 
at least the prime mover of the incidents in the 
present book. 

Those critics who know the difficulties of the 
problem with which the author has had to deal — 
who are acquainted with the many speculations 
that have been advanced as to the seat and 
sources of the intellectual and other pleasures of 
our nature, will readily discern that the princi- 
ples here enunciated have not been " decanted " 
out of previous aesthetic treatises, but are peculiar 



Xll PREFACE. 

to the present work, and spring — naturally, it is 
hoped — from the idiosyncrasy of the characters 
enunciating them. Again, it is but fair to enforce 
that the views here given as to the means by 
which labour is made pleasant, have sprung out 
of the author's previous investigations rather than 
his readings ; and so, indeed, has that part of the 
book which seeks to impress the reader with a 
livelier sense of the claims of the luckless, and 
even the criminal, to our respect and earnest con- 
sideration. Principles in fine that have cost the 
author a life to acquire are often expressed in a 
chapter, and expressed, it is hoped, sufficiently 
in keeping with the current of the story, to 
render it difficult for the reader to detect where 
the function of dramatizing ends and that of 
propounding begins. 

The "jail proper" described in this book is 
hardly the jail proper belonging to little Benja- 
min Franklin's time. 

Nor has the deviation from historic propriety 
been made unadvisedly. It is generally as idle as 
it is morbid to paint past horrors. To have set 
forth the atrocities and iniquities practised in the 
British jails a century and a half ago, would 
have been following in the track of the pernicious 
French school of literature, where everything is 
sacrificed to melodramatic intensity, and which is 
for ever striving to excite a spasm rather than 
gratify a taste. 

The genius of true English landscape painting, 
on the contrary, is " repose ;" and the genius of 
modern English poetry is " repose," too, — a kind 



PREFACE, Xlll 

of Sabbath feeling which turns the heart from the 
grossnesses and vanities of human life, and lets 
the workday spirit loose among the quiet, shady, 
and healthful beauties of nature. The intense 
school and the repose school are the two far-dis- 
tant extremes of all art ; and they differ as much 
from each other as the sweet refreshment of an 
evening by one's own fireside does from the 
heated stimulus of a tavern debauch. 

For these artistic reasons, then, the dead bones 
of the old jail iniquities and cruelties have not 
been disinterred and set up as a bugaboo here. 
Such a picture might have been true to the time, 
but mere literal truth is a poor thing after all. 
Why, Gustave le Gray's wonderful photograph of 
the Sunlight on the Sea, that is hanging before 
our eyes as we write, is as true as " Mangnall's 
Questions ;" and yet what a picturesque barbarism, 
and even falsity, it is ! It no more renders, what 
only human genius can seize and paint — the ex- 
pression, the feeling, the soul of such a scene — 
than the camera obscura can fac-simile tibe 
human eye in a portrait, or give us the faintest 
glimmer of the high Yandyke quality — the pro- 
found thinking, talking pupils of that grand old 
countenance in our r> ational Gallery. 

But the real object which the author of this book 
had in view, was to wake, not only his boy hero up 
to a sense of duty, but other boys also ; and to let 
them know (even without doing any great vio- 
lence to the natural truth of things) what prison 
iniquities are still daily wrought in the land in 



XIV PREFACE. 

which we live. The jail proper of the present 
story (though the scene is laid in British America 
before the declaration of Independence, and dates 
a century and a half back) is a mere transcript of 
a well-known jail now standing in the first city in 
the world, in the year of our Lord one thousand 
eight hundred and sixty. The details given here 
are the bare lateralities noted by the author only 
a few months back, and printed in his account of 
the metropolitan prisons in that wretched frag- 
ment of a well-meant scheme, the " Great World of 
London." There, if the sceptic needs proof, he 
can get chapter and verse, and learn that many of 
the facts here given were recorded in the presence 
of some of the visiting justices themselves. Jails 
may have been bad a hundred years ago, but this 
plague-spot of the first city in the world seems to 
the author worse than all ; because it still goes on 
after Howard's labours — after Brougham's reforms 
— after Sheriff Watson's fine industrial schools; 
yes, there it stands, giving the lie to all our May- 
day meetings, our ragged schools, our City mis- 
sions, and pretended love of the destitute, the 
weak, and the suffering. We no longer wonder that 
the atrocities of the French Bastille roused the 
Parisian people to rush off in a body and tumble 
the old prison- citadel down into a heap of ruins; 
and if Tothill Fields lay across the Channel, the 
same indignant outrage might perhaps be again 
enacted. But here, good easy citizens as we are, 
we pay our poor-rates, we call ourselves miserable 
sinners, in a loud voice, once a week, from a cosy 
pew ; our " good lady " belongs to a district visit- 



PREFACE. XV 

ing' society, and distributes tracts in the back 
slums ; we put our cheque into the plate, after a 
bottle or two of port, at a charity dinner ; and, 
this done, we are self -content. 

We once passed a quiet half-hour with Mr. Cal- 
craft, the hangman, and in the course of the conver- 
sation, he alluded to Mrs. Calcraft ! The words no 
sooner fell upon the ear than a world of wonder 
filled the brain. Even he, then, had somebody to 
care about'him. There was somebody to hug and 
caress him before he left his home in that scratch wig 
and fur cap in which we saw him come disguised 
to Xewgate (for the " roughs " had threatened to 
shoot him), and carrying that small ominous satchel 
basket, at two in the morning, on the day of 
Bousfield's execution. 

The wretched lads in Tothill Fields prison are 
worse off than Calcraft himself. They have no- 
body in the world to care about them. 

Nobody ! Yet, stay, we forget ; there is this 
same Calcraft to look after a good many of them. 

In fine — to drop the author and speak in propria 
persona — I have attempted to write a book which, 
while it treated of some subject that a boy would 
be likely to attend to, should at the same time 
admit of enunciating such principles as I wished 
my own boy, and other boys as good and as honest 
and earnest as he, to carry with them through 
life ; and yet I have striven while writing it, to 
do no positive violence to truth either in the love 
of one's art or in the heat of one's "purpose." 
In plain English, I have sought to be consistent 



XVI PREFACE. ; 

to nature — true to the spirit, perhaps, rather 
than the letter of things — even though I had a 
peculiar scheme to work out. And now such as 
it is, I give the present volume to the youth of 
the time, in the hope that it may serve them for 
what I myself felt the want of more than anything, 
after leaving Westminster School, as a young 
man crammed to the tip of one's tongue with 
Latin and Greek and nothing else, viz. : for 
something like a guide to what Uncle Ben calls 
u the right road through life." 

Hy. M. 



YOUNG BENJAMIN FRANKLIN. 



PAET I. 

YOUNG BEN'S LOYE OF THE SEA, AND HOW 
HE WAS WEANED FROM IT. 



CHAPTER I. 

"WHAT EVER SHALL WE DO WITH THE BOY?" 

A pretty chubby-faced boy, with a pair of cheeks 
rosy and plump as ripe peaches, was Master 
Benjamin Franklin in his teens. 

Dressed in a tiny three-cornered hat — a very 
small pair of " smalls," or knee-breeches — and a 
kind of little stiff-skirted fan-tailed surtout — he 
looked like a Greenwich pensioner in miniature ; 
or might have been mistaken (had the colours 
been gayer) for the little fat fairy-coachman to 
Cinderella's state -carriage. 

It would have made a pretty picture to have 
handed down to our time, could an artist have 
sketched the boy, as he sat beside his toy ship, in 
the old-fashioned, dark back parlour behind the 
tallow-chandler's store — "at the corner of Ha- 
nover and Union Streets," in the city of Boston, 
New England. 



2 YOUNG BENJAMIN FRANKLIN. 

Over the half -curtain of a glass-door, a long" 
deep fringe of white candles, varied with heavy 
tassel-like bunches of "sixes" and "eights," 
might be seen dangling from the rafters of the 
adjoining shop, with, here and there, several small 
stacks of yellow and white soap, in ingot-like 
bars, ranged along the upper shelves ; and the 
eye could also catch glimpses of the square brown 
paper cap which crowned the head of Josiah 
Franklin (the proprietor of the establishment, and 
father of our Benjamin), wandering busily about, 
as the shop-bell was heard to tinkle -tinkle with 
the arrival of fresh customers, seeking supplies of 
the "best mottled" or " dips." 

The back parlour itself, being lighted only from 
the shop, was dim as a theatre by day, so that all 
around was wrapt in the rich transparent-brown 
shade of what artists call " clear obscure." The 
little light pervading the room shone in faint 
lustrous patches upon the bright pewter platters 
and tin candlesticks that were arranged as orna- 
ments on the narrow wooden mantelpiece, whilst 
it sparkled in spots in one corner of the apartment, 
where, after a time, the eye could just distinguish 
a few old china cups and drinking-glasses set out 
on the shelves of the triangular cupboard. 

In this little room sat Benjamin's mother, spin- 
ning till the walls hummed like a top with the 
drone of her wheel, and his sister Deborah, who 
was busy making a main-sail for the boy's cutter 
out of an old towel, now that she had finished 
setting the. earthen porringers for the family 
supper of bread and milk ; while young Ben him- 
self appeared surrounded with a litter of sticks 
intended for masts and yards, and whipcord for 
rigging, and with the sail-less hull of his home- 
made vessel standing close beside him on its little- 
stocks (made out of an inverted wooden footstool),. 



"WHAT SHALL WE DO WITH THE BOY?*' 3 

and seeming as if ready to be " laid up in ordi- 
nary " — under the dresser. 

The boy had grown tired of his daily work ; for 
the candle-wicks which his father had set him to 
cut lay in tufts about the deck of his boat, and the 
few snips of cotton on the sanded floor told how 
little of his task he had done since dinner-time.* 

Indeed, it did not require much sagacity to 
perceive that Benjamin hated the unsavoury 
pursuits of soap-boiling and candle-making, and 
delighted in the more exciting enterprises of 
shipping and seafaring. On the bench at his 
elbow was the bundle of rushes that had been 
given him to trim, in readiness for what was his 
especial horror — the approaching "melting-day," 
together with the frame of pewter moulds that 
required to be cleaned for the new stock of " cast 
candles." But both of these were in the same 
state as he had received them in the morning : 
whereas the coat of the boy, and the ground all 
about him, were speckled with chips from the old 
broomstick that he had been busy shaping into a 
main-mast for his miniature yacht, and near at 
hand were two small pipkins filled with a penny- 
worth of black and white paint, with which he 
had been striping the sides of the little vessel, and 
printing the name of the " flying Dutchman or 
boston " upon her stern. 

* "At ten years old," are Franklin's own words, given in 
the history of his boyhood, written by himself, " I was taken 
to help my father in his business, which was that of a tallow- 
chandler and soap-boiler — a business to which he was not 
bred, but had assumed on his arrival in New England, 
because he found that his dyeing trade, being in little 
request, would not maintain his family. Accordingly, I was 
employed in cutting wicks for the candles, filling the moulds 
for ■ cast candles,' attending to the shop, and going errands, 
fee." At the opening' 'of our story, the lad is supposed to 
have been some time at this trade. 

B 2 



4 YOUNG BENJAMIN FRANKLIN. 

The craft itself did no small credit to young 
Benjamin's skill as a toy ship-builder, though 
certainly her " lines " were more in the washing- 
tub style of naval architecture than the " wave- 
principle " of modern American clippers : for 
the hull was fashioned after the shape of the 
Dutch "Dogger-boats" in the Boston harbour, 
and had the appearance of an enormous wooden 
shoe. 

It had taken one of the largest logs from the 
wood-house to build the boat, for she was the 
size of a doll's cradle at least. It had cost no 
little trouble, too, and broken not a few gouges in 
hollowing out a " hold " for her — even as big as a 
pie-dish ; and now that the mighty task had been 
accomplished, she had sufficient capacity under 
her hatches to carry a crew of white mice, and 
might, on an emergency, have stowed away 
victuals enough for a squirrel skipper to winter 
upon. 

Yet, in his heart, Benjamin found little plea- 
sure in the amusement. He knew he was 
neglecting his work for it ; he knew, too, that his 
half-Puritan father regarded disobedience as the 
prime cause of all error, so that playing at such a 
time was, after all, but sorry, deadly-lively sport 
to him. Instead of being delighted with the 
pastime, he went about it in fear and trembling — 
with one eye on the miniature mast he v^as shap- 
ing, and the other intently watching the move- 
ments of the dreaded brown-paper cap in the 
shop without. Every turn of the door-handle 
made his little heart flutter like a newly -trapped 
bird, and every approaching footstep was like the 
click of a pistol in his ear; so that the stick 
almost fell from his hand involuntarily with the 
fright, and the candle-wicks and scissors were 
suddenly snatched up instead, while an air of the 



" WHAT SHALL WE DO WITH THE BOY ?" 5 

most intense industry was assumed for the time 
being. 

Indeed, the boy's life of late had been one 
continual struggle and fight between *his in- 
clinations and his duty. For the last two years he 
had been supposed to be engaged at his father's 
business, though from the work being anything 
but a " labour of love " to him, he had really been 
occupied with other things. He was for ever 
longing to get away to sea, and nothing delighted 
him but what, so to speak, smacked of " the tar ;" 
whereas he sickened at the smell of the " melting- 
days," and the mere sight of the tallow was asso- 
ciated in his mind with a youthful horror of mut- 
ton fat * 

Born and bred within a stone's throw of the 
beautiful bay of Massachusetts, his earliest games 
with the children of his acquaintance had been in 
jumping from barge to barge, alongside the quay ; 
and ever since the little fellow had been breeched 
he had been able to scull a boat across the " basin ;" 
whilst, in his schoolhood, he and his cronies 
were sure every holiday to be out sailing or row- 
ing over to some one of the hundred islands that 
dappled the blue expanse of water round about 
the city. 

Steering had been the boy's first exercise of 
power, and the pleasure the little cockswain had 
felt in making the boat answer as readily as his 
own muscles to his will, had charmed him with 
the sailor % life ; while the danger connected with 

* "I disliked the trade," Franklin tells us himself, in the 
account of his early life, <; and had a strong inclination to go 
to sea ; my father, however, declared against it. But 
residing near the water, I was much in it and on it. I 
learned to swim well, and to manage boats ; and when em- 
harked witli other boys, I was cdmmonly allowed to govern, 
especially in case of any difficulty." 



6 YOUNG BENJAMIN FRANKLIN. 

the pursuit served only to increase the delight of 
triumphing over the difficulties. Again, to his 
young fancy, a ship at sea seemed as free as the 
gull in the air* (though it has been well said, on 
the contrary, that a ship is a " prison without any 
chance of escape"). Nor did he ever see a vessel 
with its white pouting sails, glide like a snowy 
summer cloud across the bay towards the silver 
ring of the horizon, without wondering what 
the sailors would find beyond it, and longing to 
be with the crew, to visit strange countries 
and people, and see what the earth was like, 
and whether it was really true that there was no 
end to the world, nor any place where one could 
stand on the brink of it, and look down into the 
great well of space below. 

For the last hour or two, however, the youth had 
laid aside his ship tools, and having given his sister 
instructions about the sail she had promised to 
make for him, had taken from his pocket the book 
which his brother-in-law, Captain Holmes— he 
who had married his half-sister Kuth, and was 
master of a sloop — had brought him that day (as 
he ran in at dinner-time just to shake hands with 
them all), on his return from his last voyage to 
England. Benjamin had been burning to read 
the volume all the day long ; for it was en- 
titled " The Adventures of Robinson Crusoe, Mariner, 
by Daniel Be Foe" and the captain had told him that 
it had " only just been published in London" at 
the time when he had set sail from that port. 

* The writer (who was a midshipman in his youth) would 
seriously advise boys to abandon all such silly notions as to the 
pleasures of a sailor's life, for he can conscientiously say that 
it is not only the hardest and most perilous of all callings, 
but one in which the living, the housing, and the gains are of 
the poorest possible kind. 



"WHAT SHALL WE DO WITH THE BOY?" 7 

From liis earliest childhood the little fellow had 
loeen "passionately fond" of reading, and all the 
halfpence his big brothers and his Uncle Ben- 
jamin gave him he was accustomed to devote to 
the purchase of books.* A new book, therefore, 
was the greatest treat that could possibly have 
been offered him, and such a one as his brother- 
in-law had brought him (for he had already turned 
over the leaves, and seen that it was about a sailor 
cast away on a desert island) was more than he 
could keep his eyes off till bedtime. 

It had been like a red-hot coal in his pocket 
all day. 

So now that his mast w~as " stepped," and 
-Deborah was getting on with the sail, young 
Benjamin had got the volume spread open on his 
knees, and was too deeply absorbed in the mar- 
vellous history of Crusoe's strange island life to 
think either of the wicks, the rushes, or the 
mould for the " cast candles " — or even the punish- 
ment that surely awaited him for his neglect. 

Again and again his mother had entreated him 
to put down the volume, and go on with the 
wicks. 

"Benjamin!" she would cry aloud, to rouse the 
lad from the trance he had fallen into, "do give 
over reading till after work time, there's a good 
child!" 

* " From my infancy/' says our hero, in the narrative of 
his boyhood, " I was passionately fond of reading, and ail 
the money that came into my hands was laid out in the 
purchasing of books. I was very fond of voyages. . . . My 
father's little library consisted chiefly of works on polemic 
divinity, most of which I read. I have often regretted, that 
at a time when I had such a thirst for knowledge, more 
proper books had not fallen in my way. There was among 
them 'Plutarch's Lives,' which I read abundantly, and still 
think that time spent to great advantage. There was also 
a bock of Be Foe's, called 'An Essay on Projects/ " 



8 YOUNG BENJAMIN FRANKLIN. 

The eager "boy, however, sat with his 4 nose 
almost buried in the leaves, and, without raising 
his eyes from the hook, merely begged to be 
allowed to read to the end of " that chapter ;" 
though, no sooner was one finished than the pages 
were turned over to learn the length of the next, 
and another begun. 

" I wish Captain Holmes had never brought 
you the book!" the kind-hearted mother would 
exclaim with a sigh, while she tapped the treadle 
of her wheel the quicker for the thought — interject- 
ing the next minute, as she heard the shop-bell 
tinkle, and stretched up her neck, as usual, to look 
over the blind, and see who was the new comer : 
" Why, there's your Uncle Benjamin got back 
from meeting, I declare ! — It will only lead, I'm 
afraid, to fresh words between you and your 
father. Your head, Ben, is too full of the sea 
already, without any vain story-books of sailors' 
adventures to lead you astray." 

" I am sure it was very kind of the captain," 
little Ben would reply, " to make me such a nice 
present; but he always brings every one of us 
something at the end of each voyage. I can't 
talk to you, though, just now, mother ; for if I 
was to get the strap for it, I couldn't break off 
in the middle of this story — it's so nice and 
interesting, you can't tell ;" and the lad again bent 
his head over the pages, so that the long hair, that 
usually streamed down upon his shoulders, hung 
over the leaves : and he kept tossing the locks 
peevishly back as he gloated over the text. 

In a moment he was utterly lost again in the 
imaginary scenes before him ; and then he no more 
heard his mother tell him that she was sure it 
was time to think about putting the shutters up, 
than if he had been fast asleep. Neither could 
sister Deborah get a word from him, even though 



"WHAT SHALL WE DO WITH THE BOY?" 9 

she wanted instructions as to where to place the 
little " reef-points" upon his mimic main-sail. 

"Benjamin! Benjamin!" cried the mother, as 
she rose from her wheel and shook the boy, to 
rouse him from his trance, " do you know, sirrah, 
that your father will be in to supper directly, 
and here you haven't cut so much as one bundle 
of wicks all the day through ? How shall I be 
able to screen you again from his anger, so strict 
as he is ?" 

The boy stared vacantly, as though he had been 
suddenly waked up out of a deep slumber, and 
began to detail the incidents of the story he had 
just read, after the fashion of boys in general, from 
the time when stories were first invented. " Crusoe 
gets shipwrecked you know, mother," he started off, 
*' and then he makes a raft, and goes off to the 
vessel, you know, and saves a lot of things from 
the ship, you know, and then, you know — " 

"There! there! have done, boy!" cried the 
mother in alarm; "this madness for the sea will 
be the ruin of you. Just think of the life Josiah 
Franklin has led since he went off as a cabin-boy, 
shortly after your father's first wife died; for 
though he was the late Mrs. Franklins pet child, 
I've heard your father say that he shut his doors 
upon him when he came back shoeless and shirt- 
less at the year's end ; and whatever has become of 
the poor boy now, the Lord above only knows."* 

* "I continued thus employed," says Franklin, in Iris 
Autobiography, " in my father's business for two years ; that 
is, till I "was twelve years old ; and then my brother John, who 
was bred to that business, having left my father, and married, 
and set tip for himself at Eh ode Island, there was every 
appearance that I was destined to supply his place, and 
become a tallow-chandler. But my dislike to the trade 
continuing, my father had apprehensions, that if he did not 
put me to one more agreeable, I should break loose to go to 
sea, as my brother Josiah had done, to his great vexation/ ' 



10 YOUNG BENJAMIN FRANKLIN. 

" But, mother," persisted the lad, whose brain 
was still so inflamed by the excitement of the 
wondrous narrative that he could neither speak 
nor think of anything else, " only let me tell you 
about what I have been reading — it's so beauti- 
ful — and then I'll listen patiently to whatever 
you've got to say ;" and without waiting for an 
answer Ben began again: "Well, you know, 
mother, Crusoe gets a barrel or two of gunpowder 
from off the wreck, you know, and some tools as 
w^ell ; and then he sets to work, you know, and 
builds himself a hut on the uninhabited island." 

The dame paid no heed to the incidents detailed 
by the lad, but kept stretching her neck over the 
curtain of the glass-door, and watching first the 
figure of her husband in the shop, and then glanc- 
ing at the wooden clock against the wall, as if she 
dreaded the coming of the supper hour, when she 
knew his father would be sure to demand of Ben- 
jamin an account of his day's work. 

She was about to snatch the book from the boy's 
hands, and remove the cottons and the rushes out 
of sight, when suddenly the voice of the father, 
calling for Benjamin to bring him the wicks, 
dispelled the boy's dream, and made the mother 
tremble almost as much as it did the lad himself. 

" Oh ! mother ! you'll beg me off once more, 
won't you?" sobbed the- penitent Benjamin, as 
his disobedience now flashed upon him, for he 
knew how often his father had pardoned him for 
the same fault, and that he had warned him that 
no entreaties should prevent him punishing him 
severely for the next offence. 

" Benjamin, I say !" shouted the voice, authori- 
tatively, from the shop. 

" Go to him, child," urged the mother, as she 
patted her pet boy (for he was the youngest) on 
the head to give him courage, " and confess your 



"WHAT SHALL WE DO WITH THE BOY?" 11 

fault openly like a little man. You know tlie 
store your father sets upon a ' contrite heart,' " she 
added, in the conventicle cast of thought peculiar 
to the early settlers in New England; "and rest 
assured, if he but sees you repentant, his anger 
will give way ; for the aim of all punishment, Ben- 
jamin, is to chasten, and not to torture ; and peni- 
tence does that through the scourging of the spirit, 
which the other accomplishes through the suffer- 
ing of the body." 

" Go you instead of me, mother — do now, there's 
a dear. You will, won't you, eh ?" begged the 
little fellow, as he curled, his arm coaxingiy about 
her waist, and looked up at her through his tears. 
" Do you tell him, mother, I never shall be able 
to keep to the horrid candle-work, for I hate it — 
that I do ; and though every night when I lie 
awake I make vows that I will not vex him again, 
but strive hard at whatever he gives me to do, 
still when the next day comes my heart fails me, 
and my spirit keeps pulling my body away " (the 
boy had caught the puritanical phrases of the 
time), "and filling my head with the delight 
of 'being on the water ; and then, for the life of 
me, I can't keep away from my voyage-books, 
or nry little ship, or' something that reminds me of 
the sea. If you'd only get him to let me go with 
Captain Holmes — " and as the dame turned 
her head away he added quickly, "just for one 
voyage, dear mother — to see how I like it, — oh ! 
I'd — I'd — I don't know what I'd not do for you, 
mother dear; I'd bring you and Deborah home 
such beautiful things then, and — " 

The boyish protestations were suddenly cut 
short by the sight of the brown-paper cap in the 
shop moving towards the parlour ; so, without 
waiting to finish the sentence, the affrighted lad 
dung open the side-door leading to the staircase , 



12 YOUNG BENJAMIN FRANKLIN. 

and scampered up to his room, with an imaginary 
parent following close at his heels. 

Here the little fellow threw himself on the 
" trestle-bed " that stood in one comer of the 
garret, and lay for a time too terrified for tears ; 
for his conscience converted the least noise into 
the approach of his father's footsteps ; so that he 
trembled like a leaf at every motion — his heart 
beating the while in his bosom like a flail. 

After a time, however, the lad, finding he was 
left by himself, began to lay aside his fears, and 
to talk, as boys are wont to do, about the hard- 
ships he endured. 

u He was sure he did everything he possibly 
could," he would mutter to himself, as he whim- 
pered between the words; "and he thought it 
very cruel of them to force him to keep to that 
filthy, nasty candle-making, when they knew he 
couldn't bear it ; and what was more, he never 
should like it — not even if he was to make ever 
so much money at it, and be able to keep a pony 
of his own into the bargain. Why wouldn't they 
let him go to sea, he wondered? He called it 
very unkind, he did." And the boy would doubt- 
lessly have continued in the same strain, had not 
the little pet guinea-pig, that he kept in an old 
bird-cage in one corner of his room, here given a 
squeak so shrill that it sounded more like the 
piping of a bird than the cry of a beast. 

Jn a moment Benjamin had forgotten all his 
sorrows ; and with the tear-drops still lingering 
in the corner of his eyes— like goutes of rain in. 
flower-cups after a summer shower — he leapt from 
the bed, saying: — "Ah! Master Toby Anderson, 
you want your supper, do you?" and the next 
minute his hand was inside the cage, dragging the- 
plump little piebald thing from out its nest of hay. 



" WHAT SHALL WE DO WITH THE BOY ?" 13 

Then, cuddling the pet creature close up in his 
neck, while he leant his head on one side so as to 
keep its back warm with his cheek, he began 
prattling away to the animal almost as a mother 
does to her babe. 

" Ah! Master Tiggy, that's what you like, don't 
you ?" said Benjamin, as he stroked his hand along 
the sleek sides of the tame little thing till it 
made a noise like a cry of joy, somewhat between 
the chirruping of a cricket and the purr of a cat. 
" You like me to rub your back, you do — you fond 
little rascal ! But I've got bad news for Toby ; 
there's no supper for him to-night ; no nice bread 
and milk for him to put his little pink tooties in 
while he eats it — for he's got all the manners of 
the pig, that he has. Ah ! he'll have to go to bed, 
like his poor young master, on an empty stomach — 
for what do you think, Tiggy dear ? Why, they've 
been very unkind to poor Benjamin, that they 
have ;" and the chord once touched, the boy con- 
fided all his sorrows to the pet animal, as if it had 
been one of his cronies at school. 

" I wouldn't treat you so, would I, Toby ?" he 
went on, hugging the little thing as he spoke, " for 
who gives the beauty nice apple-parings? and 
who's a regular little piggy-wiggy for them ? — who 
but Master Toby Anderson here. Ay, but to-night 
my little gentleman will have to eat his bed; 
though it won't be the first time he has done that ; 
for he dearly loves a bit of sweet, new hay — don't 
you, Tobe?" 

Presently the boy cried, as the animal wriggled 
itself up the sleeve of his coat, " Come down here, 
sir; come down directly, I say!" and then stand- 
ing up he proceeded to shake his arm violently 
over" the bed, till the little black and white ball 
was dislodged from the new nestling-place he had 
chosen. 



14 YOUNG BENJAMIN FRANKLIN. 

" Come here, you little rascal ! Come and let 
me look at you ! There now, sit up and wash 
yourself with your little paws, like a kitten, for 
you're going to bed shortly, I can tell you. Oh, 
he's a beauty, that he is ! — with his black patch 
over one eye like a little bull-dog, and a little 
brown spot at his side, the very colour of a pear 
that's gone bad. Then he's got eyes of his own 
like large black beads, and little tiddy ears that 
are as soft and pinky as rose-leaves. He's a nice 
clean little tiggy, too, and not like those filthy 
white mice that some boys keep, and which have 
such a nasty ratty smell with them — no ! Toby 
smells of nice new hay instead. There ! there's 
a fine fellow for you," cried the lad, as he rubbed 
up the tiny animal's coat the wrong way. " Why, 
he looks like a little baby hog with a mane of 
bristles up his neck. But Toby's no hog, that he 
isn't, for he wouldn't bite me even with my finger 
at his mouth — no ! he only nibbles at it, to have 
a game at play, that's all. But come, Master 
Anderson, you must go back to your nest, and 
make the best supper you can off your bed-clothes ; 
for you can't sleep with the cat to-night, so you'll 
have to keep yourself warm, old fellow, for I 
couldn't for the life of me go down stairs to get 
Pussy for you to cuddle just now." 

The pet was at length returned to its cage, 
and Benjamin once more left to brood over his 
troubles; so he flung himself on the bed again, 
and began thinking how he could best avoid the 
punishment that he felt sure awaited him on the 
morrow. 

Yet it was strange, he mused, his father had 
not called him down even to put the shutters up. 
Who had closed the shop? he wondered. They 
must have done supper by this time. Yes ! that 



"WHAT SHALL WE DO WITH THE BOY?" 15 

was the clatter of the things being taken away. 
Why didn't Deborah come to him ? — he always did 
to her when she was in disgrace. Who had asked 
a blessing on the food now he was away? Still 
he could not make out why he wasn't called down. 
Had mother begged him off as usual ? Xo ! that 
couldn't be, for father had threatened last time 
that he would listen to no more entreaties. Per- 
haps one of the deacons had come in to talk with 
father about the affairs of the chapel in South- 
street ;* or else Uncle Ben was reading to them 
his short-hand notes of the sermon he had gone 
to hear that evening. 7 

Soon, however, the sounds of his father's violin 
below-stairs put an end to the boy's conjectures as 
to the occupation of the family, and as he crept 
outside the door to listen, he could hear them all 
joining in a hymn 4 

Still Benjamin could not make out why his 
punishment should be deferred. However, he 
made his mind up to one thing, and that was to 
be off to his brother-in-law, Captain Holmes, at 

* " I remember well," Franklin writes in the description 
he gives of his father's character in his Autobiography, " his 
being frequently visited by leading men, who consulted him 
for his opinion on public affairs, and those of the church he 
belonged to ; and who showed a great respect for his judg- 
ment and advice." 

t "He had invented a short hand of his own," says 
Franklin in his life speaking of his Uncle Benjamin, 
" which he taught me ; but not having practised it, I have 
now forgotten it. He was very, pious, and an assiduous 
attendant at the sermons of the best preachers, which he 
reduced to writing according to his method, and had thus 
collected several volumes of them." 

% " My father was skilled a little in music. His voice was 
sonorous and agreeable, so that when he played on his violin, 
and sang withal, as he was accustomed to do after the busi- 
ness of the day was over, it was extremely agreeable to hear/ 
— Franklin's Autobiography. 



16 YOUNG BENJAMIN FRANKLIN. 

daybreak on the morrow, and get him to promise 
to take him as a cabin-boy on his next voyage — for 
that would pnt an end to all the noises between 
his father and him. 

The plan was no sooner framed than the lad 
was awa}^ in spirit again, sailing far over the sea, 
while he listened to the drone of the sacred tune 
below ; until at last, tired out with his troubles, 
he fell asleep as he lay outside the bed, and woke 
only when the air was blue with the faint light 
of the coming day. 

His first thoughts, on opening his eyes, were of 
the chastisement that he felt assured was in store 
for him if he stayed till his father was stirring. 
So without waiting to tidy himself, he crept with 
his shoes in his hand as silently as possible down 
stairs, and then slipping them on his feet, he was 
off — like a frightened deer — to the water-side. 

Come what might, little Ben was determined to 
be a sailor. 



CHAPTER II. 

" MISSING : A YOUNG GENTLEMAN- 



" If Benjamin Franklin will return to his home, all will 
be for—" 

" No ! no ! I won't have 'forgiven ' put down," 
doggedly exclaimed the father, seizing hold of 
Uncle Benjamin's arm to stop his pen, as the latter 
read out, word by word, the announcement he was 
busy writing for the town-crier ; while, in one 
corner of the room, that important civic functionary 
stood waiting for the bit of paper, with his big bell 
inverted, so that it looked like an enormous brass 
tulip in his hand. 

" I ask your pardon, Master Frankling, but we 



' 'MISSING: A YOUNG GENTLEMAN " 17 

general says ' forgiven ' in all sitch cases/' meekly 
observed the bellman, with a slight pull of his 
forelock. 

'• Oh, Josiah, remember the words of your 
morning prayer!'' interposed the broken-hearted 
mother, as for a moment she raised her face from 
out her hands: ' ; ; forgive ns as we — ' you know 
the rest." 

" Ay, come, Josh," said Uncle Benjamin, " don't 
be stubborn-hearted ! Think of the young ' never- 
do-well ' you were yourself when you were 'pren- 
tice to brother John, at Banbury."* 

" That's all very well !" murmured the Puritan 
tallow-chandler, turning away to hide the smiles 
begotten by the youthful recollection, and still 
struggling with the innate kindness of his nature ; 
" but I've got a duty to perform to my boy, and 
do it I will, even if it breaks my heart." 

"Yes, but, Josh," remonstrated Lncle Ben, as 
he laid his hand on his brother's shoulder, " think 
of the times and times you and I have stolen away 
on the sly to Northampton, to see the mummer i 
there, unbeknown to father. Ah, you were a sad 
young Jackanapes for the playhouse, that you 
were. Master Josh, at Ben's age," he- added, 
nudging the father playfully in the side. 

"I don't mean to deny it, Benjamin;" and the 
would-be Brutus chuckled faintly, as his brother 
reminded him of his boyish peccadilloes — "but," 
he added immediately afterwards, screwing up as 
good a frown as he could manage under the cir- 

* M John, my next uncle, was bred a dyer, I believe, of 
wool,"' says Benjamin Franklin himself in his life. * * ■ * 
44 My grandfather Thomas, who was born in 1598, lived at 
Ecton till he was too old to continue his business, when he 
retired to Banbury in Oxfordshire, to the house of his son 
John, with whom my father served an apprenticeship." — See 
Autobiography, pp. 3 and 4. 

C 

1 



18 YOUNG BENJAMIN FRANKLIN. 

cuinstances, " that's no reason why I should allow 
my boy to be guilty of the same sins. There, go 
along with you — do" he exclaimed good-humour- 
edly, as he endeavoured to shake off both the 
mother and the uncle, who, seeing that the ice of 
paternal propriety was fast thawing under the 
warmth of his better nature, had planted them 
selves one on either side of him. " I tell you it's 
my bounden duty not to overlook the boy's dis- 
obedience any longer ;" and, so saying, he beat 
the air with his fist, as if anxious to hammer the 
notion into his own mind as well as theirs. 

" Yerily, Josiah, justice says all should be 
punished, ' for there are none perfect — no not 
one,' " whispered the religious wife impressively 
in his ear; "but love and mercy, husband, cry 
Forgive." 

; . " To be sure they do," chimed in the good- 
natured uncle ; " for as the mummers used to say 
in the play, Josh* — ' If all have their deserts, who 
shall 'scape whipping ?' So, come, I may put down 
' forgiven,' eh ?" added the peacemaker, as he shook 
his brother by the hand, while Josiah turned away 
as if ashamed of his weakness. " Ah ! I knew it 
'ud be so," and quickly inditing the word, Uncle 
Benjamin handed the paper to the crier, saying, 
" There, my man, you'd better first go round the 
harbour with it; and if you bring the prodigal 
back with you in an hour or two, why, you shall 
have a mug of cider over and above your pay." 

The crier, having nodded his head, and scraped 
his foot back along the sanded floor, by way of 
obeisance, took his departure, when in a minute 
or two the family heard his bell jangling away at 
the end of the street, and immediately afterwards 
caught the distant cry of " Oyez, oyez, oyez ! hif 
Benjamin Frankling will return to his 'ome— " 

"Do you hear, sister?" said Uncle Benjamin, 



" MISSESG : A YOUXG GEXTLEMAX " 19 

consolingly, as lie approached the weepiHg mother ; 
" your boy will be heard of all over the town, and 
you'll soon have your little pet bird back again 
in his cage, rest assured." 

' ; Heaven grant it may be so, and bless you for 
your loving- kindness, brother!" faltered out the 
dame, half hysteric, through her tears, vriik delight 
at the thought of regaining her lost son. 

u Hah! it'll all come right enough by-and-by, n 
said Uncle Benjamin, with a sigh like the blowing 
of a porpoise, as he now prepared to copy into his 
short-hand book the notes of the sermon he had 
heard on the previous evening; li and the young 
good-for-nothing will turn out to be the flower of 
the flock yet — take my word for it. Wasn't our 
brother Thomas the wildest of all us boys, Josh ? 
and didn't he come after all to be a barrister, and a 
great man? And when Squire Palmer advised 
him to leave the forge, on account of his love of 
learning, and become a student at law. didn't father 
— you remember, Josh — vow he wouldn't listen to 
it, and declare that the eldest son of the Franklins 
had always been a smith, and a smith, and nothing 
else than a smith, his eldest son should be ? "Well," 
the good man proceeded, as he kept rubbing his 
spectacles with the dirty bit of wash-leather he 
usually carried in his pocket, " didn't Tom, I 
say, in spite of father's objections and prophecies, 
rise to be one of the foremost men in the whole 
county, and a friend of my Lord Halifax ?* ay, and 

* " Thomas, my eldest uncle," wrote Franklin in 1771 to 
his son, William Temple Franklin, who was then Governor 
of Xew Jersey, ' ; was bred a smith under his father " (" the 
eldest son being always brought up to that employment," he 
states in another place, "but being ingenious, and encou- 
raged in learning, as all his brothers were, by an Esquire 
Palmer, then the principal inhabitant of our parish, he quali- 
iied himself for the Bar. and became a considerable man in 
the county, was chief mover of all public-spirited enterprises 

c 2 



20 YOUNG BENJAMIN FRANKLIN. 

so your Ben, mark my word, will come to be courted 
by the great some day. For — though he's my own 
godson, and called after me, too— he's the very 
image of his nncle the barrister, that he is ; so like 
him, indeed, that if Thomas, instead of dying, as 
he did four years to a day before Benjamin was 
born, had quitted this world for a better just four 
7y-ears later, why I should have said — had I been a 
heathen, and believed in such things — that the 
spirit of the one had passed into the body of the 
other ; for your Ben has got the same clever head- 
piece of his own, and is for all the world the same 
greedy glutton at a book." 

44 1 grant he's a lad of some parts," exclaimed 
the flattered father, while slipping on, over the 
arms of his coat, the clean linen sleeves his wife 
had put to air for him, " and, indeed, was always 
quick enough at his learning. But I'm wanted in 
the shop," he added, as the bell was heard to 
tinkle without; "so do you, Benjamin, talk it 
over with Abiah here, and please her mother's 
heart by raising her hopes of her truant child. 
Coming!" shouted the tallow-chandler, as he 
ducked his head under the fringe of candles, 
whilst the impatient visitor kept tapping on the 
counter. 

As the husband left the parlour, the tidy wife 
cried in a half- whisper after him, " Do pray stop, 



for the county or town of Northampton, as well as of his own 
village, of which many instances were related of him, and 
he was much taken notice of and patronized by my Lord 
Halifax. He died in 1702, four years to a day before I was 
born. The recital which some elderly persons made to us of 
his character, I remember struck you as something extraor- 
dinary, from its similarity with what you know of me. * Had 
he died/ said you, ' four years later, on the same day, one 
might have supposed a transmigration/" — Autobiography, 
Bohris Edition, p. 4. 



"MISSING: A YOUXG GENTLEMAN " 21 

Josiah, and put on a clean apron, for really that 
isn't lit to go into the shop with," and then, 
finding she had spoken too late, she turned to 
Uncle Benjamin (who was now scribbling away at 
the table), and continued, with all the glory of a 
mother's pride, " I can hardly remember the time 
when our Ben couldn't read: how, too, the little 
fellow ever learnt his letters was always a mys- 
tery to me, for I never knew of any one teaching 
him.* But I can't get Josiah to bear in mind 
that he was a boy himself once ; for though Ben 
may be a little flighty, I'm sure there's no vice in 
the child." 

And now that her thoughts had been diverted 
into a more lively channel, she rose from her seat, 
and began to busy herself with making the apple- 
and-pumpkin pie that she had promised the chil- 
dren for that day's feast. 

" It was only a packman with tapes and 
ribbons," said Josiah, as he shortly rejoined the 
couple : " but even he had got hold of the news 
of our misfortune." 

" Well but, Josiah," expostulated the brother, 
looking up sideways, like a bird, from the book 
in which he was writing : " don't you remember 
the time, man alive, when you used to walk over 
from Banbury to the smithy at Ectonf every 

* "My early readiness in learning to read," says our hero, 
in the account he gives of himself, " (and which must have 
been very early, as I cannot remember the time when I could 
not read,) and the opinion of all friends that T should cer- 
tainly make a good scholar, encouraged him (my father) in 
this purpose of his — of putting me to the church." — Frcval:- 
lin's Life, p. 7. 

t " Some notes which some of my uncles, who had some 
curiosity in collecting family anecdotes, once put into my 
hands, furnished me with several particulars relative to our 
ancestors. From these notes I learned that they lived in the 
village of Ecton, in Northamptonshire, on a freehold of 



22 YOUNG BENJAMIN FRANKLIN. 

week, and go nutting and birds'-nesting with us- 
boys in Sywell Wood, on God's-day, without ever 
setting foot in His house ? and do you recollect, 
too, how we boys 'ud carry off the old iron from 
the forge, and sell it to the travelling tinker, 
who used to come round with his cart once 
a month, and put up at the ' World's End ' (that 
was the sign of the inn at Ecton, Abiah," he 
added, parenthetically, " and the half-way house 
between Northampton and Wellingborough, in 
Old England), and how we let father accuse 
Mat Wilcox, — you remember old Mat — who was 
helping him at the forge then, of stealing his 
metal, without ever saying a word to clear the 
poor man. Ah! Josiah, Josiah! we can always 
see the mote in another's eye — " 

" Say no more, Ben," exclaimed the reproved 
brother, " we are but weak vessels at best." 

"Now confess, husband," interrupted the wife, 
as she continued rolling out the paste before her, 
till it was like a sheet of buff leather, u isn't it 
better that I got you to sleep on your anger be- 
fore punishing the poor lad. It is but fright, after 
all, that has driven him from us ; and when 
he returns, let me beg of you to use reason 
rather than the whip with him." 

" Yes, Abiah," drily observed the husband, 
" ' Spare the rod,' and — " (he nodded his head as 
much as to say, " I needn't tell you the conse- 
quence,") " that is ever a woman's maxim." 



about thirty acres, for at least 300 years, and how much 
longer could not be ascertained. This small estate would 
not have served for their maintenance without the business 
of a smith, which had continued in the family down to my 
uncle's time, the eldest son always being brought up to that 
employment — a custom which he and my father followed with 
regard to their eldest sons." — Life of Franldin, pp. 2 and 3. 



" MISSIXG : A YOUNG GENTLEMAN " 28 

At this moment the side-door opened stealthily, 
and Deborah (dressed for the morning's work 
in a long checked pinafore reaching from the 
throat to the heels — so that the young woman 
looked like a great overgrown girl) thrust 
her head in the crevice, and gave her mother 
"a look'' — one of those significant household 
glances which refer to a thousand and odd 
little family matters never intended for general 
ears. 

" You can come in now, Deborah/' cried the 
mother, who, still engaged in the preparation 
of her apple-and-pumpkin pie, was busy thumb- 
ing patches of lard over the broad sheet of 
paste, and converting it in appearance into a 
huge palette covered with dabs of white paint. 
"Have you finished all up stairs ?" she inquired, 
looking round for the moment. 

The girl, in her anxiety for her brother, did 
not stop to answer the question, but said in an 
undertone, as she drew close up to her mothers 
side, " Has father forgiven Ben '?" 

The dame, however, on her part merely replied, 
" There, child ! never mind about thai just now — 
you'll know all in good time," and immediately 
began to catechise her on her domestic duties. 
4; Have you put a good fire in ' the keeping-room,' 
and sanded the floor nicely, and got out some 
more knives and forks for the children — for, re- 
member, we shall sit down upwards of a score to 
dinner to-day ?" 

But Deborah was too intent to listen to anything 
but the fate of the boy, whom she loved better 
than all her brothers, for she had been allowed to 
nurse him when a baby, though but a mere child 
herself at the time, and had continued his toy- 
maker in general up to the present moment. So 
she pulled her mother timidly by the apron, and 



24 YOUNG BENJAMIN FRANKLIN. 

said, as she glanced hastily at her father, to assure 
herself that he was still arguing with Uncle 
Benjamin, " Will father let him come back home 
— have you found out where he's gone to yet — and 
do you really think, mother, he's run away to 
sea ?" adding the next minute with a start, as the 
thought suddenly flashed upon her, " Oh, dear 
me ! I quite forgot to tell you, mother, a man 
brought this letter to the side-door, and said I was 
to deliver it privately to you." 

" What a head you have, child I" exclaimed 
the dame, as, dusting the flour from her hands, 
she snatched the note from the girl, and hastily 
tore it open. 

But her eye had hardly darted backwards and 
forwards over the first few lines, before the mother 
uttered a faint scream, and staggered back to the 
bee-hive chair. 

In a minute, the husband and Uncle Benjamin 
were at her side, and Deborah, seizing the vinegar 
cruet from the dresser- shelf, was bathing her 
mother's temples with the acid. 

" God be praised ! my boy's at Euth's," the dame 
at length gasped out in answer to the anxious 
group around her ; " Holmes has sent a note here 
to say he will bring him round in the evening," 
and she pointed languidly to the letter which had 
fallen on the floor. 



CHAPTEE III. 

THE FRANKLI2T FAMILY. 



Josiah Franklin retained sufficient of the austere 
habits of the Puritans and the early Nonconformists 
to have made it a rule — even if his limited means 
and large family (no fewer than thirteen of whom 



THE FRANKLIN FAMILY. 2d 

occasionally sat together at his table *) had not 
made it a matter of necessity — that the food par- 
taken of by the little colony of boys and girls he 
had to support should be of the plainest possible 
description. Simple fare, however, was so much 
a matter of principle with Josiah (despising, as 
he did, ail " lusting after the flesh-pots "), that he 
never permitted at his board any of those un- 
seemly exhibitions of delight or disgust, which 
certain youngsters are wont to indulge in on the 
entry of any dish more or less toothsome than the 
well-known and ever-dreaded scholastic " stick- 
jaw."f 

In so primitive a household, therefore, there 
must have been some special cause for the com- 
pounding of so epicurean a dish as the be fore-men- 
tioned apple-and-pumpkin pie, — some extraordinary 
reason why Dame Franklin should have instructed 
Deborah, as she did, u to be sure and put out 
plenty of maple sugar for the children," besides 
*'a gallon of the dried apples and peaches to be 
stewed for supper," — and why that turkey and 

• ■ * " By his first wife my father had four children born in 
America (besides three previously in England), and by a 
second, ten others — in all, seventeen — of whom I remember to 
have seen thirteen sitting together at his table, who all grew 
up to years of maturity, and were married." — Autobiography, 
p. 9. 

t " Little or no notice was ever taken of what related to the 
victuals on the table — whether well or ill cooked — in or out of 
season — of good or bad flavour — preferable or inferior to this 
or that other thing of the kind : so that I was brought up in 
such perfect inattention to these matters as to be quite in- 
different what kind of food was set before me. Indeed, I 
am so unobservant of it, that, to this day, I can scarce tell, 
a few hours after dinner, of what dishes it consisted. This 
has been a great convenience to me in travelling, when my 
companions have sometimes been very unhappy for want of 
a suitable gratification of their more delicate, because better 
instructed, tastes and appetites." — Life of Franklin, p. 9. 



26 YOUNG BENJAMIN FRANKLIN. 

those " canvas-back ducks" (so highly prized 
among the creature- comforts of America) were ere 
long twirling away in front of the bright, cherry - 
red fire, and filling the whole house with their 
savoury perfume * — and why, too, the brisket of 
corned-beef had been got up from "the cask" 
below, and was now wabbling and steaming, with 
its dozen of dough-nuts bumping against the lid of 
the iron pot on the hob, and the corn-cakes 
baking in the oven, and the huge bowl of curds 
— white and cold-looking as marble — standing on 
the dresser. 

Why all this preparation for feasting in a house 
where the ordinary food was almost as frugal as a 
hermit's fare ? 

The Franklin family knew but one holiday in 
the course of the year — the anniversary of the 
father's safe landing in America in 1685, which 
the pious Josiah had made a family " Thanksgiving 
Day." To commemorate this event, the younger 
girls (those who had not yet finished their school- 
ing) came home from their maiden aunts, Hannah 
and Patience Folger, who kept a day-school at 
Sherbourne, in Kantucket ; while the boys who 
were out in the world, serving their apprentice 

* The white, or canvas-back duck, derives its name from 
the colour of the feathers between the wings being of a 
light-brown tint, like canvas. These birds breed on the 
borders of the great northern lakes, and in winter frequent 
the Susquehanna and Potomac rivers, in order that they 
may feed on the bulbous root of a grass that grows on the 
flats there, and which has much the flavour of celery. It is 
to the feeding on this root that the peculiarly delicious 
flavour of their flesh is attributed. They are held in as great 
esteem in America as grouse with us, and are frequently 
sent as a present for hundreds of miles. A canvas-back 
duck, indeed, is reckoned one of the greatest dainties in the 
States, being more delicate in flavour than a wild xluck. 
though considerably larger. The Americans eat it with 
currant-jelly, as if it were venison. 



THE FEAXKLIX FAMILY. 27 

ship, got leave to quit their masters' house for 
the day, to take part in the family festival ; and 
the grown-up sons, who were in business for 
themselves, gave over their work, or shut up 
their stores, and came with their wives and little 
ones to join in the rejoicing. 

So sacred a duty, indeed, did all the Franklins 
regard it, to assemble once a year under the 
paternal roof, that none but the most cogent 
excuse for absence was ever urged or received ; 
so that even those who were away in distant lands 
strove to return in time for the general meet- 
ing. 

The morning was not far advanced, and Josiah 
had hardly done putting up the shutters of his 
store, as was his wont on this day precisely at 
ten in the forenoon, before the boys and the girls, 
and the grown-up young men and women of the 
family, began to swarm in like so many bees at 
the sound of a gong. 

First came Jabez and Xehemiah — two stout, 
strapping lads, carpenter's and mason's appren- 
tices (the one had called lor the other on his 
road), dressed in their Sunday three-cornered hats 
and bright -yellow leather breeches, and with their 
thick shoes brown with the earth of the ploughed 
fields they had trudged over, and carrying in their 
hands the new walking-sticks that they had cut 
from the copse as they came along. 

Then young Esther and Martha made their 
appearauce, wrapped in their warm scarlet cloaks, 
and looking like a pair of " little Red Riding- 
Hoods " — for they had come from school at Nan- 
tucket, and had been brought to the door by the 
mate of the New York sloop that plied between 
Long Island and Boston, touching at the inter- 
vening islands on the way. once a month in those 
days. Under their cloaks they carried a bundle 



28 YOUNG BENJAMIN FRANKLIN. 

containing the long worsted mittens' they had 
knitted for the mother, and the warm patchwork 
quilt they had made for the father, together with 
the highly-prized samplers of that time — the latter 
of which had been done expressly to be framed 
for the keeping-room. 

After these walked in John Franklin, the tal- 
low-chandler (who was just about to set up in 
Ehode Island), with his young Quakeress wife 
on his arm ; and then followed the married 
daughter, Abiah, and her husband, the trader in 
furs and beaver skins, who had always an inex- 
haustible stock of stories to tell the children about 
the Choctaw and Chickasaw Indians, including 
wild tales of the chiefs "Blue Snake" or "Big 
Bear," or even Nekig the " Little Otter." 

Nor did Zachary, the ship-builder (he who had 
sent the ducks from the Potomac river), absent 
himself, even though he had to come all the way 
from Annapolis for the gathering ; and he brought 
with him his motherless little boy, for his young 
wife had died of the fever since the last family 
meeting. 

There was Ebenezer, too, the bachelor farmer : 
and the swarthy and stalwart Thomas, the first- 
born and hereditary smith of the family; and 
Kuth, with her half-dozen little ones toddling 
close after her, like a hen with her brood of chicks ; 
and Samuel Franklin, Uncle Benjamin's son from 
London, who had recently set up as a cutler in 
Boston city ; and, indeed, every one of the Frank- 
lins that could by any means manage to reach the 
house at the time. 

Only three out of the multitudinous family 
were absent : James, the printer, who had gone 
to London to purchase a stock of types — Josiah, 
the outcast — and Benjamin, the little runaway. 

The absence of the elder brothers created no 



THE FRANKLIN FAMILY. 29 

astonishment ; for Josiah had not sat at that board 
for years — many of the young children, indeed, 
had never set eyes on his countenance — while all 
had heard of James's trip to the mother-country. 
But where was Ben ? — where was Ben ? was the 
general cry, as the family came streaming in, one 
after another. 

Jabez and JSTehemiah ran all over the house, 
shouting after the little fellow. Esther and 
Martha, too, kept teasing Deborah all the morning 
to tell them where he had got to, for they fancied 
he was hiding from them in play, and they were 
itching to show him the little sailor's Guernsey 
frock they had knitted for him at school. John 
wished to hear how the lad got on at candle- 
making, and whether he could manage the dips 
yet, and Zachary to see what new toy-ship he had 
got on the stocks — and, indeed, every one to say 
something to him ; for he was a general favourite, 
not only because he was the youngest of the boys, 
but because he was the cleverest and best-natured 
of them all. 

The news that Ben was " in disgrace " made all 
as sad as death for a time ; but every one had a 
kind word to say for him to the father. The 
younger ones begged hard for him; the elder 
ones pleaded well for him : so that Josiah had not 
fortitude enough to hold out against such a 
friendly siege, and was obliged to promise he 
would let the boy off as lightly as possible ; 
though, true to his principles, the would-be 
disciplinarian vowed that the next time "he'd — 
he'd — but they should see." 

Mistress Franklin (as the sons and daughters 
came pouring in one after another, till the house 
was so full of boys and girls — children and 
grandchildren — that it was almost impossible, as 



30 YOUNG BENJAMIN FRANKLIN. 

lias been well said, to shut the doors for them) 
had enough to do between preparing the dinner 
and tidying the young ones for the occasion; 
though it almost broke her housewife's heart to 
find how buttonless and stringless, and even 
ragged, their clothes had become during their 
long absence. 

Scarcely had she kissed the boys before she 
twisted them round by the shoulders, as she eyed 
them from top to toe, and commenced pouring 
down upon their unlucky heads a heavy shower 
of motherly reproofs ; whilst the lads, who were 
thinking only of the feast, kept worrying her 
as to what she was going to give them for dinner. 

"Dear heart!" she would begin to one, "why 
don't you wash up at the roots of your hair, boy ?" 
or else she would exclaim, as she threw up her 
hands and eyebrows, "Is that your best coat? 
Why, you've only had it a year, and it's not fit to 
be seen. W^here you fancy the clothes come from, 
lad, is more than I can tell." 

The boy, however, would merely reply, " What 
pie have you made this year, mother? — I hope 
it's a big ? un ! Let's have a peep in the oven — 
you might as well." 

Then to another she would cry, as she seized 
him by his leg like a sheep, "Why, I declare 
there's a large hole in the heel of your stocking, 
boy, big enough for a rat to get through ; and if 
you were a sweep's child, I'm sure your linen 
couldn't well be blacker." 

But this one paid no more heed than the other 
to the. dame's observations ; for the only answer 
lie made was, " Got any honey, mother, for after 
dinner? Don't the ducks smell jolly, Jabe — 
that's all ! I say, mother, give us a sop in the pan." 

Nor did the girls undergo a less minute scrutiny. 
" Why didn't a big child like Esther write home 



THE FRANKLIN FAMILY. ol 

hjoA say she wanted new flannels, for those she'd 
on were enough to perish her. She never saw 
children grow so in all her life." 

" Come here, girl ; whatever is the matter with 
your mouth ?" next she would shriek, as she 
caught hold of Martha, and dragged her to the 
light; ''you want a good dosing of nettle-tea to 
sweeten your blood — that you do." Whereupon, 
heaving a deep sigh, she would add, "Hah! you 
must all of you, children, have a spoonful or two of 
nice brimstone and treacle before you leave home 
again." 

Then, as soon as the dame caught sight of Euth, 
she began to question her about poor little Ben, 
continuing her cooking operations the while. At 
one moment she was asking whether the lad was 
fretting much, and the next she was intent on 
basting her ducks, declaring that there was no 
leaving them a minute, or she'd have them burnt 
to a cinder. 

Now she would fall to stirring the potful of 
"hominy," and skimming the corned beef; then 
pausing for an instant to tell Euth how frightened 
she had been when she found that poor Ben had 
left the house that morning, and begging of her 
to get Holmes to do all he could to set the lad 
against the sea. 

And when Euth had told the mother that 
Holmes was obliged to stay and see his cargo 
discharged at the wharf, and that he thought it 
would save words if Ben came round with him in 
the evening ; and when she had informed her, 
moreover, that Ben had forgotten it was Thanks- 
giving-day at home, till he saw her and her little 
ones leaving for the feast, and that then he seemed 
to take it to heart greatly — the mother stopped 
short in her examination of the pie during the 
process of baking, and cried, as she held it half 



32 YOUNG BENJAMIN FRANKLIN. 

drawn out of the oven, " I'll put by a bit of every- 
thing for him, and he shall have the largest cut 
of the pie, that he shall ;" adding the next minute, 
" But he'll be round in the evening in time for the 
stewed fruit and corn-cakes — bless him !" 

Immediately after this she began wondering 
again whether that girl Deborah had thought 
about tapping a fresh cask of cider, and " fussing," 
as usual, now about her boy, and then about her 
dinner. 



CHAPTER IV. 

THE FEAST, AND AN AREIVAL. 

When all the family had assembled in the " keep- 
ing-room," it was the invariable custom of the 
Puritan father on this day to offer up a prayer of 
thanksgiving for his safe arrival in New England ; 
after which the violin was taken out, and he would 
play while the family joined in a hymn. This 
was usually followed by a short discourse from 
Josiah, touching the great principles of religious 
liberty, so dear to the early settlers of America ; 
for the sturdy old Nonconformist loved to impress 
upon the children gathered round him that he 
had left the home where his forefathers had lived 
for many generations — not to seek " treasures that 
moth and rust corrode," but merely to be able to 
worship the Almighty as he thought fit, and which 
was held to be a crime at that time in his native 
land.* 

* " My father married young, and carried his wife with 
three children to New England about 1685. The conven- 
ticles being, at that time, forbidden by law, and frequently 
disturbed in the meetings, some considerable men of his 
acquaintance determined to go to that country, and he was 
persuaded to accompany them thitber, where they expected 



THE FEAST, AND AN ARRIVAL. 33 

The family devotions and discourse were barely 
ended ere the " cuckoo clock " whooped twelve, 
and immediately a crow of delight from the 
younger branch of the Franklin family announced 
the entry of the corned beef and dongh-nuts. 

Such manifestations of the pleasures of the 
palate, we have before said, were highly dis- 
approved of by the simple-minded Josiah ; so, as 
his eye suddenly lighted upon the young car- 
penter's apprentice, in the act of rubbing his 
waistcoat, and drawing in his breath in youthful 
ecstasy, the ascetic father cried, with a shako of 
the head : 

" Jabez ! how often have I told you that this 
giving way to carnal joys is little better than a 
heathen !" 

But scarcely had the parent finished chiding one 
son, than he was startled by a loud smacking of 
the lips from another; when, glancing in the 
direction of the sound, he found the young mason 
with his mouth and eyes wide open, in positive 
raptures, as he sniffed the savoury odour of the 



to enjoy the exercise of their religion with freedom. * * * 
Our humble family early embraced the reformed religion," 
writes Benjamin Franklin. " Our forefathers had an English 
Bible, and to conceal it, and place it in safety, it was 
fastened open with tapes under and within the cover of a 
joint-stool. "When my great-grandfather wished to read 
it to his family, he placed the joint-stool on his knees, and 
then turned over the leaves under the tapes. One of the 
children stood at the door to give notice if he saw the appa- 
ritor coming, who was an officer of the Spiritual Court. . . 
This anecdote," Franklin adds, " I had from uncle Ben- 
jamin. The family continued/' he then proceeds to say, " all 
of the Church of England, till about the end of Charles II.'s 
reign, when some of the ministers who had been * outed ' for 
their nonconformity, having opened a conventicle in North- 
amptonshire, my Uncle Benjamin and my father adhered 
to them, and so continued all their lives." — Franklin's Auto- 
biography, p. 5. 

D 



34 YOUNG BENJAMIN FRANKLIN. 

brown and smoking canvas-back ducks that 
Deborah was about to place at the bottom of the 
table. 

" I'm ashamed of you, Nehemiah," the tallow- 
chandler shouted, as he frowned at the lad, 
" giving up your heart to the vanities of this 
world in such a manner !" 

A secret pull at his coat-tails, however, from 
Uncle Benjamin, cut short the lecture, for the 
father knew that the friendly hint meant to im- 
ply, " It's only once a year, Josh !" 

At length the dinner was ended, grace said, and 
a button or two of the boys' waistcoats undone ; 
and then the table itself was got out of the way, 
and the games commenced. 

This, however, was a part of the entertainment 
that the seriously-inclined Josiah was but little 
given to ; and, indeed, it required some more of 
Uncle Ben's good-humoured bantering before 
he could be induced to consent to it. E^en then 
he insisted that the children should play at 
"Masters and Men," because there was a certain 
amount of knowledge to be gained from the repre- 
sentations of the various trades ; for nothing 
annoyed him more than to see youth wasting its 
time in mere idle amusements. 

But the ice of propriety once broken, Uncle Ben 
and the children were soon engaged in the most 
boisterous and childish gambols : not only was 
"dropping the 'kerchief" indulged in — and the 
grave ' Josiah himself made to form part in the 
ring — but even the wild frolic of " jingling 5r 
was resorted to, and the father and mother, and 
Uncle Ben — and Zachary the shipbuilder, and 
Euth too — as well as young Abiah and her hus- 
band, the trapper — and John, and his young 
Quakeress wife — and, indeed, the entire company 
— were all pressed into the service, and everyone 



THE FEAST, AND AN ARRIVAL. 35 

of them blindfolded at the same time ; whilst the 
part of " jingler* 5 fell to the lot of Xehemiah, who 
ran about the keeping-room like a frantic young 
town crier, ringing the hand-bell to give notice of 
his whereabouts to the blind players, as they kept 
rolling continually one over the other in their 
eagerness to catch him. 

It was at this moment, when the noise and 
madness of the sport had reached their greatest 
height, and the father and Uncle Benjamin lay 
flat upon the floor, with a miscellaneous mound of 
children and grandchildren piled on top of them, 
that James Franklin — the young printer, who had 
gone to London for a stock of types and presses — 
burst into the room, fresh from the vessel that 
had just dropped anchor in the bay, and with 
his arms laden with packets of presents for the 
several members of the family. 

"Here's brother James come back from Old 
England!" shouted ISehemiah, throwing away his 
bell. 

In an instant the bandages were torn from all 
the faces, and the half-ashamed father dragged 
from under the bodies struggling on top of him 
— the newly-arrived son laughing heartily the 
while. 

As the children and the grown brothers, and the 
rest, came scrambling up to kiss or shake hands 
"with the printer, on his return, he told them one 
after the other the gift he had brought them from 
the "old country;" and when he had greeted the 
whole of the company present, he stared round 
and round, and then glancing at Josiah, cried, 
"But where's little Ben, father?" 

Josiah averted his head, for he had no wish to 
mar the general happiness by again alluding to 
his boy's disgrace, while the mother shook her 

d 2 



36 YOUNG BENJAMIN FRANKLIN. 

head significantly at the printer, and Uncle Ben- 
jamin gave him a secret kick. 

James knew by the pantomimic hints that 
something was amiss; so he answered, "What! 
not allowed to be present on Thanksgiving-day ? 
Surely, father, one outcast in the family is 
enough !" 

" There, say nothing about it, lad," cried Uncle 
Ben ; " it's all been looked over long ago, and the 
little fellow will be here to supper shortly. But 
come, let's have the news, Master James? You 
went down to Ecton, of course ?" he added : and 
the young man had scarcely signified that he had 
made the journey, when the father and uncle, 
anxious to know all about their native village, 
and the companions of their youth, fired off such 
a volley of questions, that it was more than James 
could do to answer them fast enough. 

Had he been to the old smithy ? inquired one ; 
and had he got a slip of the " golden pippin " tree 
in the orchard? 

Was Mistress Fisher still living at the forge ? 
asked the other, and who carried on the busi- 
ness now that their brother Thomas's son was 
dead? 

"Dear, dear!" they both cried, as they heard 
the answer, " the smithy sold to Squire Isted, 
the lord of the manor,* and the old forge pulled 
down ? Well ! well ! what changes do come to 
pass !" 

Xext it was, How was their new German king, 
George I., liked by the people at home ? And 
did he go and have a mug of ale at the " World's 

# " My grandfather's eldest son, Thomas, lived in the house 
at Ecton, and left it, with the land, to his only daughter, 
who, with her husband, one Fisher, of Wellingborough, sold 
it to Mr. Isted, now lord of the manor/' — Life of Franldin, 
p. 3. 



THE FEAST, AXD AN ARRIVAL. 37 

End?" and did Dame Blason keep the old inn 
still? Did he go to meeting too at the North- 
ampton Conventicle, and learn whether the 
" Brownists " were increasing in numbers round 
about ? and was old Luke Fuller, who was " ottted " 
for Nonconformity at the time when they them- 
selves seceded from the Church, the minister there 
still? 

And when James had replied that the good 
man had departed this life two years come 
Michaelmas, the old people hung down their head 
as they sighed, " Hah ! it will be our turn soon." 

Then they wanted to know, Were the rebels in 
Scotland all quiet when he left ? and had he beer- 
over to Banbury, and seen the dye-house, and had 
John Franklin still got the best of the business 
there ? 

Had he set eyes on their old schoolfellow, 
Eeuben of the Mill ? and was old Ned, the travel- 
ling butcher, still alive ? And who held the 
" hundred-acre farm " of the young Lord Halifax 
now? And did the Nonconformists seem con- 
tented with the " Toleration Act?" and was there 
any stir among them about getting "the Cor- 
poration Act " repealed ? And was Squire Palmer's 
widow living at the Hall still ? And had he been 
over and seen the folk at Earls-Barton and Hears- 
Ashby, and told them that they were all doing 
well in New England. Hah ! they would give the 
world to set eyes on the old places and the old 
people again. 

The gossip about their native village and 
ancient friends would have continued, doubt- 
lessly, until bedtime, had not Jabez — who had a 
turn for that extravagant pantomime which boys 
consider funny — here danced wildly into the 
room after the style of the Eed Indians that his 
brother-in-law, the trapper, had just been telling 



38 YOUNG BENJAMIN FRANKLIN. 

them about, and springing into the air with a 
cry imitative of the war-whoop, announced to 
the startled company that the "Big Bear" and 
" Little Otter" were coming up the stairs to join 
the party. 

Vv ; hereupon Captain Holmes and the truant 
Benjamin entered the room. 



CHAPTER V. 

THE FATHER'S LECTURE. 



" Come this way, Benjamin ! I wish to speak with 
you below," said the father, gravely, as soon as the 
lad had gone the round of his relatives, and just 
at the interesting moment when the "carnal- 
minded " Jabez was making Ben's mouth water 
with a list of the many good things they had had 
for dinner that day. 

The paternal command caused no little excite- 
ment among the youthful members of the family, 
who knew too well what the summons meant. 

But scarcely had Josiah removed one of the 
lighted candles from the mantel -shelf to carry 
with him to the parlour, than the mother rose and 
followed close at the heels of the father and the 
chap-fallen boy ; whilst Jabez and Nehemiah 
nudged one another aside, as they whispered, 
" Let's come too, and see what father's going to do 
with Ben." 

To satisfy their curiosity, the anxious lads 
availed themselves of the darkness of the shop, 
where they stood — quiet as mutes — peeping over 
the curtain into the little back room, and watch- 
ing the movements of their parents within. 

"Father's lecturing him well, I can see," whis- 




' Father's lecturing him well, 1 can see, 



"—P. 39. 



THE father's lecture. 39 

pered Jabez, on tip-toe, to the brother at his side, 
" for he is shaking his head till his gray locks fly 
about again, and holding up his forefinger as he 
always does, you know, when he's talking very 
seriously." 

"What's mother doing?" asked the brother. 

" Why, she's got Ben drawn close up to her, and 
keeps passing her hand over his cheek," answered 
Jabez. " How aged father gets to look, doesn't he ?" 
the boy added, almost in the same breath, for he 
could not help remarking the change, now that 
his whole attention was riveted on his parent's 
figure. " He's got to stoop dreadfully since last 
Thanksgiving-day." 

" Yes," observed the other, " that Sunday gray 
coat of his, that he's had ever since I can remember, 
gets to hang about him like a smock frock, that it 
does. I was thinking so only just before dinner, 
Jabe." 

" Ah ! and mother isn't so young as she used to 
he," mournfully continued Jabez, " for she gets to 
look more like old grandfather Folger in the face, 
every — " 

"What's that noise?" whispered Keheiniah, as 
a loud scuffle was heard in the parlour. 

" Why father's just dragged Benjamin from 
mother's arms," was the answer, " for she kept 
hugging and kissing him all the time he was lec- 
turing him. Hush ! I shall hear what he says 
directly, for he's talking much louder now." 

" What's he telling him, eh ?" inquired the young 
mason, in an under tone, after holding his breath 
till he felt half stifled with his suspense. 

" I can just make out that he's very angry with 
mother for petting Ben as she does," replied the 
little carpenter, " because father says c it makes his 
conduct appear undeservedly harsh, and strips his 
reproofs' — yes, those were his words — ' of all the 



40 YOUNG BENJAMIN FRANKLIN. 

force that justice would otherwise give them.' 
Isn't that like father, Nee ?" 

" Yes," added the brother ; " he may be a little 
severe at times, but he's always very just with us, 
I'm sure ; and mother, you know, wUl spoil Ben, 
because he's the youngest of us boys." 

" Be quiet, Nee !" said Jabez, as he kicked his 
brother gently to enforce the command, and put 
his ear closer to the door, "Father's saying now 
that if Ben doesn't like the candle-making — yes " 
— and the lad paused to catch the remainder of 
the speech — " he'll let him choose a trade for him- 
self. What do you think of that V 

"Why that comes of Uncle Benjamin being 
here," interposed Nehemiah. " Uncle's been 
having a long talk with father about the matter, I 
can see." 

" Do be quiet, will you, or I shall miss it all," 
cried Jabez, tetchily. " What's that he's saying 
now ?" the lad inquired, talking to himself, as he 
strove to catch the words. " Father's warning 
Ben," he added in measured sentences, as he fol- 
lowed the old man's voice, " that when he's chosen 
another trade — if he ever runs away from his work 
again — he'll close his doors against him for ever — 
the same as he did with his outcast son, Josiah." 

An hour or two after the above scene, the three 
boys, fresh from their supper of stewed peaches and 
hot corn-cakes (of which the mother had given her 
pet boy Ben double allowance), had retired to the 
little attic for the night, and when Jabez and 
Nehemiah had heard from their brother all about 
liis running away, and the wonderful "Flying 
Dutchman " (clipper built) that he'd got nearly 
ready for launching, they began to gossip among 
themselves, as boys are wont to do, while they 
prepared for bed. 



THE FATHER'S LECTUKE. 41 

First Ben's guinea-pig was taken out, and exhi- 
bited to the admiring brothers, who, boy-like, 
were young " fanciers," not only of guinea-pigs, 
but of every pet animal in creation — from white 
mice to monkeys; whereupon they immediately 
commenced discussing the comparative beauties of 
the " black," the " tortoiseshell," and the " fawn " 
kinds of African porkers — one saying that " too 
many tea-leaves were not good for them, as they 
made them pot-bellied," and the other remarking 
that "he didn't like guinea-pigs because they ate 
their young like rabbits :" a circumstance which 
suddenly reminded him of a " double-smut " of 
his acquaintance that "had devoured her whole 
litter of six — every bit of them except their tails, 
but those she couldn't swallow because they were 
so fluffy." 

This led to a long discourse on rabbits in general, 
when Jabez dived very learnedly into the varieties 
of " double-lops," and " horn-lops," and " oar-lops," 
as well as the "up-eared" species, and told tales 
of wonderful Does, the tips of whose " fancy r ears " 
had touched the ground, and measured more than 
a foot in length. 

After this the conversation branched off to 
pigeons, young Benjamin observing, that if Jabe 
would only make him a "snap-trap," he'd keep 
some " tumblers " in their loft, for Captain Holmes 
had just brought Bobby a couple of beautiful 
" soft-billed almonds " from London : besides, there 
was a prime place for a pigeon-house against their 
melting-shed, and a schoolfellow of his at old 
Brownwell's had promised to give him a pair of 
splendid-hooded "Jacobins," and some " Leghorn 
runts " for stock directly he'd got a place to keep 
them in ; so Jabe might as well make a house for 
him in his overtime. 

Presently the young carpenter and mason pro- 



42 YOUNG BENJAMIN FRANKLIN. 

ceeded to compare notes as to the strength of the 
." sky-blue," and the thickness of the butter on the 
" scrape" at their respective masters, and to talk 
of the wives of those gentlemen as u Old Mother 
So-and-So ;" nntil, tired of this subject, the youth- 
ful trio digressed into ghost stories, and so 
frightened each other with their hobgoblin tales, 
that, as the candle sputtered and flickered in the 
socket, they trembled at every rattle of the win- 
dow-sashes, till sleep put an end to their terrors 
and their talk. 

At length the morning arrived when the younger 
branches of the Franklin family were to return to 
their masters and mistresses ; and then the dame 
was in the same flurry as on the day of their 
arrival, with the preparation of the hundred and 
one things required at her hands. 

On the table before her lay a small lot of brown 
worsted stockings done up into balls that resembled 
so many unwashed potatoes, and new canvas smocks 
for the boys to work in (short as babies' shirts), 
and new shoes too, the soles of which were studded 
with nails almost as big as those on a church door 
— as well as mob-caps, and tippets, and aprons for 
the girls, after the style of our charity children of 
the present day — and hanks of worsted yarn for 
knitting, and seed-cakes, and bags of spiced-nuts, 
together with a jar of honey for each of them — 
besides a packet of dried herbs to be made into 
tea, to " purify their blood " at the spring and fall 
of the year. 

When, too, the dreaded hour of departure arrived 
and the boys' bundles had been made up, and the 
girls' hand-baskets ready packed for the journey, 
the tears of the mother and little ones rolled down 
their cheeks as fast and big as hail-stones down 
a skylight ; and, as the weeping children crossed 



A TALK ABOUT THE SEA. 43 

the threshold, the eager dame stood on the door- 
step, watching them down the narrow street, and 
calling after them to remind them of an infinity 
of small things they were to be sure and do 
directly they reached their destination. 

Ben, too, on his part, kept shouting to Jabez, 
"not to forget to make him the pigeon-house as 
soon as he could get the wood," and calling to the 
young mason to remember to send him some prime 
" bonces " and " alleys " directly he got back to the 
stone-yard. 



CHAPTER VI. 

A TALK ABOUT THE SEA. 



On the evening after the Thanksgiving-day Capt. 
Holmes came round, when they had " knocked off 
work" at the ship, to smoke his pipe with Josiah 
and Uncle Benjamin — for the father wished the 
captain to talk with young Ben about his love of 
the sea ; so the dame had made one of her famous 
bowls of " lambs'- wool" for the occasion. 

The captain was a marked contrast, both in form 
and feature, to Josiah and his brother Benjamin. 
His frame seemed, indeed, to be of cast iron, his 
chest being broad as a bison's, and the grip of his 
big, hard hand like the squeeze of a vice. His 
face was gipsy-bronze with the weather he had 
long been exposed to, and set in a horse-shoe of 
immense black whiskers, the hair of which stood 
out from the cheeks on either side like a couple 
of sweep's brushes ; and between these his white 
teeth glistened like the pearly lining of an oyster- 
shell as he laughed, which he did continually, 
and almost without reason. 



44 YOUNG BENJAMIN FRANKLIN. 

The old men, on the other hand, were but the 
noble ruins of humanity — graced rather than dis- 
figured by age. At the time of the opening of 
our story, Josiah was in his sixty-third year, and 
Uncle Benjamin some few years his senior; and 
yet neither gave signs of the approach of that 
second childhood which is but the return of the 
circle of life into itself — linking the gray-beard 
with the infant, and foreshadowing the Eternal in 
that mysterious round which brings us back (if 
the furlough from Above be but long enough) to 
the very babyhood from which we started. 

The red Saxon blood, as contradistinguished 
from the swarthier Korman sap, inherent in Eng- 
lish veins, was visible in the cheeks of both of 
the old men ; indeed, their complexion was so 
pinky that one could well understand their boast 
that "they had never known a day's illness in 
their lives ;"* whilst their fresh colour contrasted 
as pleasantly with their silver-white hair as the 
crimson light of a blacksmith's forge glowing 
amid the snow of a winter's day. The only sign 
that the brothers gave of age was a slight crooking 
of the back, like packmen bending beneath their 
load — of years ; for their teeth were still perfect, 
neither was the mouth drawn in, nor were the 
cheeks hollowed with the capacious dimples of 
second childhood. 

Had it not been for the "sad colour" and 
formal Quaker-like cut of their clothes, no one 
would have fancied that they belonged to that- 
heroic and righteous body of men, who, following 
in the footsteps of the first " pilgrims " to America, 
had willingly submitted to the martyrdom of exile 

* " I never knew my father or mother to have any sickness 
but that of which they died — he at 89 and she at 85 years of 
age." — Autobiography, p. 9. 



A TALK ABOUT THE SEA. 45 

for the sake of enjoying the free exercise of their 
religion ; for the hale and hearty Josiah had the 
cheerful and contented look of the English yeoman, 
whilst the more portly and durapy Benjamin had 
so good-hnmonred an air that he might have been 
mistaken, in another suit, for the jolly landlord oi 
a road-side inn.* 

Mistress Franklin, being some dozen years 
younger than her husband — and looking even 
younger than she was — seemed barely to have 
reached the summit of life's hill, rather than to 
have commenced her journey down it. True, a 
quick eye might have discovered just a filament or 
two of silver streaking the dark bands of hair that 
braided her forehead ; but these were merely the 
hoar-frosts of Autumn whitening the spider's 
threads — for as yet there was no trace of Winter 
in her face. 

At the first glance, however, there was a half- 
masculine look about the dame that made her 
seem deficient in the softer qualities of feminine 
grace, for her features, though regular, were too 
bold and statuesque to be considered beautiful 
in a woman ; and yet there was such exquisite 
tenderness — indeed, a plaintiveness that was almost 
musical — in her voice, together with such a good 
expression, glowing like sunshine over her whole 
countenance, that the stranger soon felt as assured 
of her excellence as those even who had proved it 
by long acquaintance. 

The wife, too, belonged to the same Puritan 
stock as Josiah; her father — -' ; Peter Eolger of 
Sherbourne " in Nantucket — having been amongst 
the earliest pilgrims to xS ew England, and being 

# " I suppose you may like to know what kind of a man 
my father was," says Benjamin Franklin in writing to his 
son. " He had an excellent constitution, was of a middle 
stature, well set, and very strong." 



46 YOUNG BENJAMIN FRANKLIN. 

styled " a godly and learned Englishman" in the 
chronicles of the country.* 

The simplicity of her dress, however, consti- 
tuted the chief mark of her conventicle training. 
The main characteristic of her appearance was 
the immaculate cleanliness as well as the fastidious 
neatness of her attire. There was so much of 
white, indeed, about her (what with the mob-cap, 
the muslin kerchief crossed over her bosom, and 
the ample linen apron covering her skirt) that 
she always looked fresh and tidy as a dairy — 
snowy as suds themselves. Her dress, too, was 
as free as a moonlight scene from all positive 
colour, for even the mere fillet of ribbon which 
she wore round her cap was black, and her stuff- 
gown itself gray as a friar's garment. 

" I've been pointing out to the youngster here, 
father," proceeded the captain, as he punctuated 
his speech with the puffs of his pipe, when the 
subject of the evening's conversation had been 
fairly broached ; " what a dog's life a sailor's is, and 
asking him how he'd like to live all his time upon 
maggoty biscuits and salt junk, that goes by the 
name of ' mahogany ' aboard a ship — because it's 
so hard and red, and mud easier carved into 
chess-men than it's chewed and digested, I can 
tell you. I've been asking him, too, how he'd 
like to ha.ve to drink water that's as black and 
putrid, ay ! and smells, while its being pumped 
out of the casks in the hold, as strong as if it was 
being drawn out of a cesspool, so that one's glad 

* " My mother (the second wife of my father) was Abiah 
Folger, daughter of Peter Folger, one of the first settlers of 
New England. ; of whom honourable mention is made by 
Cotton Mather in his ecclesiastical history of that country, 
entitled Magnolia Christi Americana, as ' a godly and learned 
Englishman,' if I remember the words rightly." — Life cf 
Franklin, p. 6. 



A TALK ABOUT THE SEA. 47 

to strain it through the corner of his handkerchief 
while drinking it from the 'tots/ And, what's 
more, youngster, you'd get only short allowance of 
this stuff, I can tell you ; for over and over again, 
when I was a boy aboard the ' Francis Drake,' 
I give you my word I've been that dry in the 
tropics (what with the salt food, that was like 
munching solid brine, and the sun right overhead 
like a red-hot warming-pan) that I've drunk the 
sea-water itself to moisten my mouth, till I've 
been driven nearly mad with the burning fury of 
the thirst that was on me. Ah ! you youngsters, 
Ben, little know r what we sailors have to put up 
with ; for mind you, lad, I'm not pitching you 
any stiff yarn here, about wrecks, and being cast 
away on rafts, and drawing lots as to who's to be 
devoured by the others ; but what I'm telling you 
is the simple every-day life of the seaman, ay! 
and of half the ' reefers,' too." 

Here the captain paused to indulge in his 
habitual chuckle (for it was all the same to him 
whether the subject in hand was serious or 
comic), while Mistress Franklin looked perfectly 
horror-stricken at the account of the water her boy 
had been, as it were, just on the point of drinking. 

Little Ben himself, however, was not yet " at 
home " enough to make any remark, but sat on 
the stool at his mother's feet, with his eyes count- 
ing -the grains of sand on the floor, for he was 
still ashamed to meet his father's gaze. 

As for Josiah, he was but little moved by 
the captain's picture of the miseries of seafaring, 
and merely observed, that as he had taught his 
children to abstain from hankering after the " flesh- 
pots," Ben could bear the absence of creature- 
comforts better than most boys — a remark that set 
the captain chuckling again in good earnest. 

" AT hat you say, father, about hankering after 



48 YOUNG BENJAMIN FRANKLIN. 

tlie ' flesh-pots,' is all very well," continued the 
good-humoured sailor, as he tittered, while he 
tapped the ashes from the bowl of his pipe, lt but 
if you'd had a twelvemonth on mahogany and sea- 
biscuits as hard and dry as tiles, you yourself would 
get hankering after a bit of ' soft tommy ' (that's 
our name for new bread, Ben) and a- cut of 
roast-beef, I'll be bound : ay ! ay ! and think the 
fat old bum-boat woman that comes off to the ship 
with a cargo of fresh quartern loaves, directly you 
make the land, the loveliest female in all creation. 
But," added Captain Holmes, after a long pull at 
afresh mug of the delicious " lambs' -wool," " there 
are worse things aboard a ship, let me tell }~ou, 
Ben, than even the rations. Youngsters think 
seafaring a fine life because it's full of danger, 
and looks pretty enough from the shore ; but only 
let them come to have six months of it 'tween 
decks, cooped up in a berth little bigger than a 
hutch, and as dark and close as a prison-cell, 
directly the wind gets a little bit fresh and the 
scuttles and port-holes have to be closed ; and 
to be kept out of their hammocks half the night, 
with the watches that must be kept on deck wet 
or dry, fair or foul — ay ! and to be roust out too, 
as soon as they get off to sleep — after the middle- 
watch, may be — to reef topsa'ls, or take in to'-gal- 
lan'-sa'ls, or what not, whenever a squall springs 
up — only let them have a taste of this, I say, and 
they soon begin to sing another song, I can tell 
you. Why, when I was 'prentice on board the 
* Francis Drake,' I've often been put to walk the 
deck with a capsta'n-bar over my shoulder, and a 
bucket of water at the end of it to keep me awake, 
and even then I've been that drowsy that I've 
paraded up and down by the gangway as fast 
asleep as if I'd been a som — som — what do vou 
call it ?" - 



A TALK ABOUT THE SEA. 49 

"-nambulist," suggested Uncle Benjamin. 

" Ay ! ay ! that's it, mate," nodded the captain, 
with another laugh. 4< And over and over again 
when I've sneaked away to pick out a soft plank 
between the hencoops, and have just dropped off, 
the second-mate has found me out, and come 
and emptied two or three buckets of salt water over 
me, and set me off striking out as if I was swim- 
ming, for I'd be fancying in my sleep, you see, 
that the vessel had got on a reef, and was filling 
and going fast to the bottom. 

" But the worst of all, lad," the sailor went 
on, when he had done puffing away at his pipe, so 
as to rekindle its half-extinguished fire, " is to be 
roust out of your sleep with the boVain's whistle 
ringing in your ears, and the cry of e A man over- 
board ! a man overboard !' shouted on every side." 

" Ah, that must be terrible indeed," shuddered 
Mrs. Franklin, as she covered her face with her 
palms in horror at the thought. 

Little Ben, however, sat with his mouth open, 
staring up in the captain's face, and mute with 
eagerness to hear the story he had to tell. The 
father and uncle, too, said not a word, for they 
were loth to weaken the impression that the 
captain's simple narrative was evidently making 
on the sea-crazed boy. 

" Ay, ay, mother !" Captain Holmes proceeded ; 
"it is terrible, I can assure you, to rush on deck 
in the darkness of night, when even your* half- 
wakened senses tell you that there is nothing but 
a boundless watery desert round about the ship, 
and to find the canvas beating furiously against 
the masts, as the sails are put suddenly aback to 
check the way upon the vessel. Then, as you fly 
instinctively to the ship's side, you see, per- 
haps, some poor fellow struggling with the black 
waves, and, strange to say, apparently swimming 

E 



50 YOUNG BENJAMIN FRANKLIN. 

as liard as lie can away from the vessel itseli 
before it is well brought to — for one forgets, at the 
moment, yon see, the motion of the ship : and so 
as it dashes past the wretched man in the water, 
it seems as if he, in the madness of his fright, 
was hurrying away from the hull rather than the 
hull from him. ' Who is it ? who is it ?' cry a 
score of voices at once. ' Tisdale, 5 answers one. 
' No, no ; it's Swinton,' says another. ' I tell you 
it's Markham,' shouts a third ; ' he fell from the 
main-chains as he was drawing a bucket of water ;' 
and while this goes on, some one, more thoughtful 
than the rest, runs to the stam and cuts adrift the 
life-buoy that is always kept hanging there over 
the taffrel. Then, as the buoy strikes the water, 
the blue light that is attached to it takes fire, and 
the black mass of waves is lighted up for yards 
round with a pale phosphoric glow. But scarcely 
has this been done, before some half-dozen brave 
fellows have rushed to the davits, and jump- 
ing into the cutter over the ship's quarter, low- 
ered the boat, with themselves in it, down into the 
sea. The next minute the oars are heard in the 
silence of the night to rattle quickly in the 
rullocks, while the cox'ain cries aloud, c Give 
way, boys ; give way/ and the hazy figure of the 
receding boat is seen to glide like a shadow 
towards the now-distant light of the life-buoy 
dancing on the water. Then how the sailors 
crowd about the gangway, and cluster on the 
poop, peering into the darkness, which looks 
doubly dark from the very anxiety of the gazers 
to see farther into it ! The sight of the sea, Ben, 
miles away from land on a starless night is 
always terrible enough ; for then the dark ring of 
water encompassing the lonely vessel looks like a 
vast black pool, and the sky, with its dull dome of 
clouds, like a huge overhanging vault of lead. But 



A TALK ABOUT THE SEA. 51 

when you know, lad, that one of your own ship- 
mates is adrift in that black pool — where there is 
not even so much as a rock, remember, to cling tG 
— and battling for very life with the great waste 
of waters round about him, why, even the rough- 
est sailor's bosom is touched with a pity that 
makes the eyes smart again with something like a 
tear. You may fancy then how the seamen watch 
ihe white boat, as it keeps searching about in the 
■pale light of the distant buoy ; and how the crowd 
at the ship's side cry first— 4 Now they see him 
yonder ;' and next, as the cutter glides away in 
another direction — ' No, they're on the wrong 
track yet, lads ;' — and then how the men on 
board discuss whether the poor fellow could swim 
or not, and how long he could keep up in the 
water ; until at length the buoy-light fades, and 
even the figure of the cutter itself suddenly 
vanishes from the view. Nothing then remains 
but to listen in terrible suspense for the pulse of 
the returning oars ; and as the throbbing of the 
strokes is heard along the water, every heart- beats 
with eagerness to learn the result. ' What cheer, 
boys, what cheer ?' cries the officer, as the boat's 
crew draw up alongside the vessel once more, and 
every neck is craned over the side to see whether 
the poor fellow lies stretched at the bottom of 
the cutter. And when the ugly news is told that 
the body even has not been found (for that is 
the usual fate in the dark), you can form, per- 
haps, some faint idea, Ben, of the gloom that 
comes over the whole crew. ' "Whose turn is it to 
be next, — who is to be left like that poor fellow 
fighting with the ocean in the dark ? What be- 
came of him ? is he still clinging to the spar that 
was thrown to him, — struggling and shrieking to 
the ship as he sees the cabin lights sailing from 
his sight? or was he seized by some shark lurking 

e 2 



52 YOUNG BENJAMIN FRANKLIN. 

in the ship's wake, and dragged under as soon as 
he struck the waves ? Who can say ?' And the 
very mystery gives a greater terror to such an end." 

" The Lord have mercy on the lost one's soul," 
sighed Benjamin's mother, as she hngged her boy 
close to her knees, grateful even to thanksgiving 
that he had escaped so ghastly a doom. As for 
Ben himself, his eyes were glazed with tears, and 
as he still looked up in the captain's face, the big 
drops kept rolling over his long lashes till his 
little waistcoat was dappled with the stains. 

The good-natured captain did not fail to note 
how deeply the lad had been touched with the 
story, and jerking his head on one side towards 
the boy, so as to draw the father's attention to 
the youngster, he indulged in one of his habitual 
chuckles as he said, " Come, come, Ben, swab the 
decks. You haven't heard half of the perils of a 
sailor's life yet. Ah ! you lads think a long 
voyage at sea is as pleasant as a half-hour's cruize 
in the summer-time ; so / did once, but a few 
weeks in the middle of the ocean, where even the 
sight of a gull, or a brood of Mother Carey's 
chickens seems a perfect God-send in the intense 
solitude of the great desert about you — and where 
the same everlasting ring of the horizon still 
pmsues you day after day, till the sense of the 
distance you have to travel positively appals the 
mind — a few weeks of such a life as this, lad, is 
sufficient to make the most stubborn heart turn 
back to home and friends, and to pray God in 
the dead of the night, when there is nothing but 
the same glistening cloud of stars set in the 
same eternal forms to keep one company, that 
he may be spared to clasp all those he loves 
to his bosom once again. You think a sailor, 
youngster, a thoughtless dare-devil of a fellow, 
with hardly a tender spot to his nature — the 



A TALK ABOUT THE SEA. 53 

world speaks of his heart as a bit of oak ; but I 
can tell you, boy, if you could bear the yarns that 
are spun dining the dog-watches on the fo'cas'l, 
there is hardly a tale told that isn't homeward 
bound, as we say, and made up of the green 
scenes of life, rather than the ugly perils at sea. 
Ay! and what's more, Ben, if we could but know 
the silent thoughts of every heart on deck during 
the stillness of the middle watch, I'd wager there 
is not one among them that isn't away with 
mother, sister, or sweetheart, prattling all kinds 
of fond and loving things to them. Your father 
Josiah. too, would tell you that sailors are a god 
less, blaspheming race ; but / can tell you, lad, 
better than he (for I know them better), that a 
seaman, surrounded as he always is with the very 
sublimity of creation — with the great world of 
water by day, which seems as infinite and incom- 
prehensible as space itself, and with the lustrous 
multitude of stars by night — the stars that to a 
sailor are like heaven's own beacon-lights set 
up on the vast eternal shore of the universe, as 
if for the sole purpose of guiding his ship along 
a path where the faintest track of any previous 
traveller is impossible — the sailor, I say, amid 
such scenes as these, dwells under the very tem- 
ple of the Godhead himself, and shows in the 
unconquerable superstition of his nature — despite 
his idle and tmmeaning oaths — how deeply he 
feels that every minute of his perilous life is 
vouchsafed him. as it were, through the mercy of 
the aU-Merciful." 

The pious brothers bent their heads in reverence 
at the thoughts, while the mother looked tenderly 
and touchingly towards her son-in-law, and smiled 
as if to tell him how pleased she was to find that 
even he, sailor as he was, had not forgotten the 
godly teaching of his Puritan parents. 



54 YOUNG BENJAMIN FRANKLIN. 

For a moment or two there was a marked silence 
among the family. The captain had touched the 
most solemn chord of all in their heart, and they 
sat for a while wrapt in the sacred reverie that 
filled their mind like the deep-toned vibration of 
"a passing bell." 

Presently Captain Holmes, who was unwilling 
to leave his brother Ben without fairly rooting 
out every thread of the romance that bound the 
little fellow to the sea, proceeded once more with 
his narrative. 

" But I'll tell you what, Master Ben, is the most 
shocking sight of all that a sailor has to witness, ay, 
and one that makes a stark coward of the bravest, 
and a thoughtful man of the most thoughtless — 
death, youngster! — death, where there are no 
churchyards to store the body in, and no tomb- 
stones to record even the name of the departed ; 
death, amid scenes where there is an everlasting 
craving for home, and yet no home-face near to 
soothe the last mortal throes of the sufferer. Why, 
lad, I've seen a stout, stalwart fellow leave the deck 
in the very flush of life and health, as I came on 
duty at the watch after his, and when I've gone 
below again, some few hours afterwards, I have 
found him stricken down by a sun-stroke as sud- 
denly as if he had been shot, and the sailmaker 
sitting by his berth, and busy sewing the corpse 
up in his hammock, with a cannon-ball at the feet. 
The first death I had ever witnessed, lad, was 
under such circumstances as these. I was a mere 
youngster, like yourself, at the time, and had been 
by the man's side day after day — had listened to 
his yarns night after night — had heard him talk, 
with a hitch in his breath, about the wife and 
little baby-boy he had left behind — had seen her 
name (ay, and some half a dozen others), with 
hearts and love-knots under them, pricked in blue 



A TALK ABOUT THE SEA. 55 

on his great brawny arms. I had known him, 
indeed, as closely as men locked within the same 
walls for months together, and suffering the same 
common danger, get to know and like one another. 
I had missed sight of his face for bnt a few hours, 
and when I saw it next, the eye was fixed and 
glazed, the features as if cut in stone, the hand 
heavy and cold as lead ; and I felt that, boy as I 
was, I had looked for the first time deep down 
into the great unfathomable sea of our common 
being. The hardest thing of all, lad, is to believe 
in death ; and when we have been face to face with 
a man day by day, there seems to be such a huge 
gap left in the world when he is gone, that the 
mind grows utterly sceptical, and can hardly 
be convinced that an existence, which has been 
to it the most real and even palpable thing in 
all the world, can have wholly passed away. 
To look into the same eyes and find them return 
no glance for glance — to speak and find the ear 
deaf, the lips sealed, and the voice hushed, is so 
incomprehensible a change that the judgment posi- 
tively reels again under the blow. Ashore, lad, 
you can get away from death ; you can shut it out 
with other scenes, but on board ship it haunts you 
like a spectre ; and then the day after comes the 
most dreadful scene of all — burial on the high seas" 

The captain remained silent for a moment or 
two, so that Ben might be able to " chew the cud" 
of his thoughts. Holmes had noticed the little 
fellow's head drop at the mention of the death at 
sea, and he was anxious that the lad should realize 
to himself all the horror of such a catastrophe. 

Presently Captain Holmes began again : — " As 
the bell tolls, the poor fellow's shipmates come 
streaming up the hatchways, with their heads bare 
and their necks bent down ; for few can bear to 
look upon the lifeless body of their former com- 



56 YOUNG BENJAMIN FRANKLIN. 

anion, stretched, as it is, on the hatches beside 
the ship's gangway, pointing to its last home — j 
the sea ; whilst the ship's colours, with which it 
is covered, scarcely serve to conceal the outline 
of the mummy-like form stitched in the ham- 
mock underneath. It needs no elocution, Ben, 
to make the service for the dead at sea the most 
solemn and impressive of all prayers — an outpour- 
ing that causes the heart to grieve and the soul 
to shudder again in the very depth of its emotion ; 
for with the great ocean itself for a cathedral, and 
the wild winds of heaven to chant the funeral 
dirge, there is an awe created that cannot pos- 
sibly be summoned up by any human handi- 
work. And when the touching words are uttered, 
of ' ashes to ashes, and dust to dust,' and the body 
is slid from under the colours into the very 
midst of the ocean — as if it were being cast back 
into the great womb of Nature itself — a horror 
falls upon the senses like a deep absorbing 
stupor." 

Another long pause ensued. The captain him- 
self was absorbed in recalling all the sad associ- 
ations of the scenes he had described. Josiah 
and Uncle Benjamin had long forgotten the little 
lad whose love of the sea had been the cause of 
the discourse, and were silently nursing the pious 
thoughts that had been called up in their minds ; 
w r hile poor Mrs. Franklin sat sobbing and mutter- 
ing to herself disjointed fragments of prayers. 

Presently the mother rose from her seat, and 
flinging herself on the captain's shoulder wept half 
hysterically; at last, with a strong effort, she 
cried through her sobs : " The Lord in heaven 
reward you, Holmes, for saving my boy from such 
a fate." 

Next Uncle Benjamin started from his chair, 
and going towards his little namesake, said, as he 



A TALK ABOUT THE SEA. 57 

led hiin to his weeping parent, " Come, dear lad, 
promise your mother here you will abandon all 
thoughts of the sea from this day forth." 

"I do mother," cried the boy, " I promise you 
I will." 

The mother's heart was too full to thank her 
boy by words ; but she seized him, and throwing 
her arms about his neck, half smothered him with 
kisses, that spoke her gratitude to her son in 
the most touching and unmistakable of all lan- 
guage. 

" Give me your hand, sir," said Josiah to little 
Benjamin ; "let us be better friends than we yet 
have been, and to-morrow you shall choose a trade 
for yourself." 

" Oh, thank you, father, thank you," exclaimed 
the delighted lad ; and that night he told his joys 
to his guinea-pig, and slept as he had never done 
before. 



END OF PART I, 



58 



PAET II. 

YOUNG BEN'S LESSON IN LIFE, AND WHAT 
HE LEAKNT FROM IT. 



CHAPTEK VII. 

GOING OUT IN THE WORLD. 

It was arranged by Josiah and his wife, after part- 
ing with, the captain overnight, that young Ben- 
jamin should be intrusted to the care of his uncle 
for a few days, before being called upon to select 
his future occupation in life. 

Uncle Benjamin had pointed out to the father 
that he was too prone to look upon his boy as a 
mere industrial machine, and had begged hard to 
be allowed to take his little godson with him " out 
in the world " for a while, so as to give him some 
slight insight into the economy of human life and 
labour. 

" The lad at present," urged the uncle, " is 
without purpose or object. He knows absolutely 
nothing of the ways of the world, and has no more 
sense of the necessity or nobility of work — nor, 
indeed, any clearer notion of the great scheme of 
civilized society, than an Indian Papoose. What 
can a child like him," the godfather said, " under- 
stand of the value of prudence, of the over- 
whelming power of mere perseverance — or of 
the magic influence of simple energy and will — 



GOING OUT IN THE WORLD. 5& 

till lie is made to see and comprehend the dif- 
ferent springs and movements that give force, 
play, and direction to the vast machinery of in- 
dustry and commerce ? So far as the great world 
of human enterprise is concerned," added the uncle, 
" the lad is but little better than a pup of eight 
days old ; and until his mind's eye is fairly opened, 
it is idle to expect him to have the least insight 
into the higher uses and duties of life." 

As soon as the morning meal of the next day 
was finished, little Benjamin, to his utter astonish- 
ment, was presented by his uncle with a new fish- 
ing-rod and tackle, and told to get himself ready 
to start directly for a day's sport. 

" What ever can this have to do with the choice 
of a trade ?" thought the boy to himself. 

There was no time, however, for wondering ; for 
the next minute the mother was busy brushing 
his little triangular hat, while his sister was 
helping him on with his thick, big-buckled 
shoes. Then a packet of corned beef and bread 
was slipped into the pocket of his broad-skirted 
coat ; and without a hint as to what it all meant, 
the little fellow was dismissed with a kiss and a 
** God-speed " upon his mysterious journey. 

The boy and his uncle were not long in travers- 
ing the crooked and narrow streets of Boston. 
The quaint old-fashioned State House in front 
of the large park -like "common" was soon left 
behind, and the long wooden bridge crossed in the 
direction of the neighbouring suburb of Dorchester. 

Young Benjamin, though pleased enough to be 
free for a day's pleasure, was so eager to be put 
to some new occupation, that he kept speculating in 
his own sim pie manner, as he trotted along with 
his rod on his shoulder, as to why his father had 
broken his promise with him. 



(30 YOUNG BENJAMIN FRANKLIN. 

The uncle guessed the reason of his little 
nephew's silence, but said not a word as to the 
real object of the excursion ; and as they made 
towards the heights of Dorchester, he recounted 
to the lad, in order to divert his thoughts, stories 
of the persecutions of the Franklin family in the 
old country; till at length, having reached a 
small streamlet at the foot of the heights them- 
selves, the rod and line were duly mounted, and 
the day's sport commenced. 

Then, as the boy sat on the green bank, with 
iiis fishing-rod speared into the ground, and watch- 
ing the tiny float that kept dancing like a straw in 
the current, the old man at his side took advan- 
tage of the quietude of the spot to impress his 
little nephew with his first views of life. 

It was a lovely autumn day. The blue vault 
of the sky was like a huge dome of air upspring- 
ing from the distant horizon, and flecked with 
large cumulus clouds that lay almost as motion- 
less, from lack of wind, as if they were mounds 
of the whitest and softest snow piled one above 
another. From an opening between two such 
clouds the sun's rays came pouring down visibly, 
in distinct broad bands of " fire mist" — such as 
are seen streaming through a cathedral window — 
and fell upon the earth and water in large sheets 
of dazzling phosphorescence. Out at sea, the 
broad ocean-expanse constituting the Bay of 
Massachusetts looked positively solid as crystal 
in its calmness, while the shadows of the clouds 
above, dulling in parts the bright surface of 
the water, swept over it almost as imperceptibly 
as breath upon a mirror. In the distance, the 
little smacks that seemed to be revelling in the 
breeze far away from land had each left be- 
hind them a bright trail, which looked like a long 
shining scar upon the water ; and from the scores of 



GOING OUT IN THE WORLD. 61 

islands, dappling the great ocean-lake, ferry boats 
freighted with, a many-coloured load of market- 
women, peasants, and soldiers kept plying to and 
from the shore. 

Looking towards the home they had left, the 
town of Boston itself was seen crowding the 
broad peninsular pedestal on which it was 
set, and the three hills that gave it its an- 
cient name of " Tri-mountain," swelling high 
above the tide at its base. In front of the city, 
the masts of the many vessels in the harbour were 
like a mass of reeds springing out of the water, 
and from the back and sides of the town there 
stretched long wooden bridges, which in the dis- 
tance seemed as though they were so many cables, 
mooring the huge raft of the city to the adjacent 
continent. 

The country round about was dappled with 
many a white and cosy homestead, and the earth 
itself variegated as a painter's palette with all the 
autumn colours of the green meadows and the 
brown fallow lands — the golden orchards, the 
crimson patches of clover, and the white flocks and 
red cattle with which it was studded; whilst 
overhead, on the neighbouring Dorchester heights, 
there rose a fine cloud of foliage that was as rich 
and yet sombre in its many tints as the sky at 
sunset after a storm. 

" Look round about you, lad," said Uncle Ben- 
jamin to the youth at his side, "and see what a 
busy scene surrounds us. There is not a field 
within compass of the eye that the husbandmen 
are not at work in. Yonder the plough goes 
scoring the earth, as the yoke of oxen passes slowly 
over it, and changing the green soil into a rich 
umber brown, so that the exhausted ground may 
drink in fresh life from the air above. Here the 
farm cart is in the field studding it with loads of 



62 YOUNG BENJAMIN FRANKLIN. 

manure at regular distances, to serve as nutriment 
for the future grain. The smoke from the up- 
rooted heaps of stubble burning yonder goes drift- 
ing over the dark plain, in order that even the 
ashes from the past crop may tend to feed the 
coming one. That swarthy-looking fellow you 
see over there, Ben, with a basket on his arm, is a 
sweep, sowing soot broadcast, for the same purpose. 
Down by the shore, again, the people are out with 
their waggons collecting seaweed, with a like 
object. At the salt-marshes, too, you perceive the 
cowherd is busy opening the sluices, so that th& 
tide as it flows may moisten the rich meadows 
upon which the cattle are grazing. 

" On the other hand," continued the old man, as 
he pointed to the several objects about him, "the 
tiny vessels yonder, that look like so many white 
gulls as they skim the broad bay, are those of 
the fishermen gathering supplies for to-morrow's 
market. That noble-looking Indiaman, with the 
men, like a swarm of bees about its yards, gather- 
ing in the pouting sails as it enters the harbour, is 
laden with teas and spices from the East ; and that 
line of craft moored beside the ' Long Wharf,' 
with the cranes dipping into their holds, is landing 
bags of sugar from the Western Indies. The drove 
of cattle halting there to drink at the road-side 
pool, and with their reflected images colouring the 
water like a painting, have come from the distant 
prairies to swell our butchers' stores. The white 
figure you can just see at the top of yon mill is 
that of the miller's man, guiding the dangling 
sacks of flour on their way down to be carted off 
to the city. The very birds of the air — the crows 
now cawing as they fly over head ; the swallows 
twittering as they skim zigzag across the surface 
of the pools ; the white gull yonder that has just 
settled down on the waves ; the hawk poised above 



GOING OUT IN THE WORLD. 63 

the wood waiting for the coming pigeon ; are, one 
and all, in quest of food. Even the very insects 
beside us are busy upon the same errand. The big 
bee buzzing in the flower cup at our feet; the 
tiny ants, that are hardly bigger than motes in 
the sunbeam, hurrying to and fro in the grass ; the 
spider that has spun his silken net across the twigs 
of the adjacent hedge — are all quickened with the 
cravings of their bigger fellow-creatures. Indeed, 
the sportsman on the hills above, whose gun now 
makes the woods chatter again, is there only 
from the same motive as is stirring the insects 
themselves. And you yourself, Ben, — but look at 
your float, lad ! look at your float ! The bobbing 
of it tells you that the very fish — like the birds 
and the insects, the sportsmen and the husband- 
men round about — have left their lurking-places 
on the same hungry mission. Strike, boy, 
strike!" 

As the uncle said the words, the delighted 
youngster seized the rod, and twitched a plump- 
looking chub, struggling, from the pool. 

In a few minutes the prize was stored away in 
the fish-basket they had brought with them, and 
the float once more dancing in the shade above the 
newly-baited hook in the water. 

And when the rod was speared anew in the 
ground beside the brook, Uncle Ben said to his 
nephew, as the little fellow flung himself down on 
the bank slope, " Can you understand now, my 
little man, why I brought you out to fish ?" 

The lad looked up in his uncle's good-humoured 
face, and smiled as the solution of the morning's 
riddle flashed across his mind. 

"Why, to teach me, uncle, that everything that 
lives seeks after its food," answered the younger 
Benjamin, delighted with the small discovery he 
had made ; for as yet he had never shaped, in 



64 YOUNG BENJAMIN FRANKLIN. 

his mind, the cravings of creatures into anything 
approximating to a general law. 

" Hardly that, my little man," replied the uncle, 
"for I should have thought your own un guided 
reason would have shown you as much ere this. 
What I really want to impress upon you, Ben, is 
rather the vital necessity for work. The lesson I 
wish to teach you is not a very deep one, my lad ; 
but one that requires to he firmly and everlast- 
ingly engraven on the mind. Now look round 
again, and see what difference you can notice be- 
tween the lives of animals and plants. Observe 
what is going on in the fields, and what among the 
insects, the birds, the fishes, the beasts, and even 
the men, that throng the land, the air, and the 
water about us." 

The boy cast his eyes once more over the broad 
expanse of nature before him, and said, hesitat- 
ingly, "The animals are all seeking after food, 
and — and — " 

" The husbandmen are busy in the fields, taking 
food to the plants," added Uncle Benjamin, help- 
ing the little fellow to work out the problem. 

" The one form of life goes after its food, and the 
other has it brought to it." 

The old man paused for a minute, so that the 
lad might well digest the difference. 

" The distinctive quality of an animal," he then 
went on, "is that it seeks its own living, whereas 
a plant must have its living taken to it." 

"I see," said Benjamin, thoughtfully. 

" An animal," said the uncle, " cannot thrust its 
lower extremities into the ground and drink up the 
elements of its trunk and limbs from the soil, like 
the willow-tree there on the opposite bank, whose 
roots you can see, like a knot of writhing snakes, 
piercing the earth all round about it. Unlike the 
tree and the shrub, Ben, the animal is endowed 



GOING OUT IN THE WORLD. 65 

with a susceptibility of feeling, as well as fitted 
with a special and exquisitely beautiful appa- 
ratus for motion. The sentient creature is thus 
not only gifted with a sense of hunger to tell him 
instinctively (far better than any reason could pos- 
sibly do) when his body needs refreshment ; but in 
order to prevent his sitting still and starving with 
pleasure (as he assuredly would have done if hunger 
had been rendered a delight to him) this very 
sense of hunger has, most benevolently, been made 
painful for him to suffer for any length of time. 
Now it is the pain or uneasiness of the growing 
appetite that serves to sting the muscles of his 
limbs into action at frequent and regular in- 
tervals, and to make him stir in quest of the 
food that is necessary for the reparation of his 
frame. And what is more, the allaying of the 
pain of the protracted appetite itself has been ren- 
dered one of the chief pleasures of animal nature." 

"How strange it seems, uncle, that I never 
thought of this before ! for, now yon point it out to 
me, it is all so plain that I fancy I must have been 
blind not to have noticed it," was all that the 
nephew could say ; for the new train of thought 
started in his brain was hurrying him away with 
its wild crowd of reflections. 

"Bather it would have been much stranger, 
Ben, could you have discovered it alone : for such 
matters are visible to the mind only, and not to be 
noted by the mere eyes themselves," the uncle 
made answer. 

" I understand now," exclaimed the boy, half 
musing; " all animals must stir themselves in 
order to get food." 

" Ay, my lad ! but there is another marked dif- 
ference between animals and plants," continued 
the uncle, " and that will explain to us why even 
food itself is necessary for animal subsistence. A 

F 



66 YOUNG BENJAMIN FRANKLIN. 

tree, you know, boy, is inactive — that willow 
would remain where it is till it died unless moved 
by some one — and there is, therefore, little or no 
waste going on in its frame. Hence the greater 
part of the nutriment it derives from the soil and 
air is devoted to the growth or strengthening of its 
trunk and limbs. But the chief condition of 
animal life is muscular action , and muscular action 
cannot go on without the destruction of the tissues 
themselves. After a hard day's exercise, men are 
known to become considerably lighter, or, in other 
words, to have lost several pounds weight of their 
bodily substance. Physicians, too, assure us that 
the entire body itself becomes changed every 
seven years throughout life : the hair, for in- 
stance, is for ever growing, the nails are being 
continually pared away, the breath is always 
carrying off a certain portion of our bulk, the 
blood is hourly depositing fresh fibre and absorb- 
ing decayed tissues as it travels through the sys- 
tem ; transpiration, again, is for ever going on, and 
can only be maintained by continual drains upon 
the vital fluids within. Even if we sit still, our 
body is at work — the heart beating, the lungs 
playing, the chest heaving, the blood circulating ; 
and all this, as with the motion of any other 
engine (even though it be of iron), must be 
attended with more or less friction or rubbing 
away of the parts in motion, and consequently 
with a slower or quicker wearing out or waste of 
the body itself." 

44 1 should never have thought of that, uncle," 
observed the youth. 

44 It is this waste, lad, which, waking or sleep- 
ing, moving or resting, is for ever going on in the 
animal frame, that makes a continual supply of 
food a vital necessity with us all. Food, in- 
deed, is to the human machine what coals are to 



GOIXG OUT m THE WORLD, 67 

.Savery's wonderful steam-engine — the fuel that is 
necessary to keep the apparatus in motion ; and, 
as a chaldron of coal applied to a steam-boiler will 
do only a certain amount of work, so a given quan- 
tity of bread and bacon put into a man's stomach 
is equal to merely a definite quantity of labour. 
But since we can only get food by working, why 
work itself, of course, becomes the supreme neces- 
sity of our lives. Our blood, our heart, our lungs 
are, as I said, for ever at work, and we must there- 
fore work, if it be only to keep them working. It 
is impossible for such as us to stand still without 
destroying some portion of our substance ; and 
hence one of three things becomes inevitable." 

" And what are they, uncle ?" 

" Why, work, beggary, or death !" was the over- 
whelming reply. % 'You may choose winch of the 
three you will adopt, but one or other of them there 
is no escaping from. You must either live by your 
own labour, lad, or by that of others, or else you 
must starve — such is the lot of all." 

"Work, beggary, or death!" echoed the boy, as 
he chewed the cud of his first lesson in life. 
" Work, beggary, or death!" 

Then suddenly turning to his uncle, the little 
fellow exclaimed, "You have given me thoughts 
I never knew before. Let me go home and tell 
my father and mother how different a boy you 
have made me, and my future life shall show you 
how much I owe to this day's lesson." 

The journey home was soon performed, for young 
Benjamin was too full of what he had heard to feel 
the distance they journeyed. 

" Well, Ben, my boy !" exclaimed the father, as 
the little fellow entered the candle store, " what 
sport have you had? What have you brought 
home ?" 

f 2 



68 YOUNG BENJAMIN FRANKLIN. 

" I have brought one fish," answered his son, 
demurely. 

" Is that all ?" asked the old man. 

" No," replied the altered youth. " I have come 
hack with one fish and one strong determination, 
father." 

"Eh, indeed! A strong determination to do 
what, my lad ?" said the parent. 

" To lead a new life for the future," was the 
grave response of the little man. 



CHAPTEK VIII. 

"A HIT ! A HIT!" 



That night, after the evening hymn had been 
chanted by the family, to the accompaniment of 
the father's violin as usual, and young Benjamin 
had retired to rest, the conversation of the 
brothers and the wife turned upon the marked 
change that had occurred in the little fellow's 
behaviour. 

" He certainly seems a different lad," observed 
the father, as he arranged the table for the hit at 
backgammon that he and his brother Benjamin 
occasionally indulged in after the day's work; 
" quite a different lad. I really don't think he 
uttered a word beyond ' asking the blessing ' all 
supper-time." 

"And when I went up to his room to take his 
light," chimed in the mother, who had now settled 
down to her knitting, and was busy refooting a 
pair of the young carpenter's worsted stockings, 
"the dear child was praying to God to give him 
grace and strength to carry out his new purpose." 

"Well! well! that looks all healthy enough, 



"a hit! a hit!" 69 

mother," exclaimed Josiah, rattling away at the 
dice-box, ' ' if it'll only last. You see the flesh is 
weak with all of us, and children are but reeds in 
the wind ; poor little reeds, mother." 

"Last!" echoed Benjamin, as he raised his eye 
for a moment from his brother's game, " why, with 
God's blessing, it's sure to last, that it is. What 
I've told you all along, Josh, is that you hadn't 
faith in that boy's mind. He's as like our own 
brother Tom, I say again, as one grain of sand 
is to another ; and as our Thomas came to be 
the foremost man of our family, why, mark my 
words, Josh, your Ben will grow up to be the 
greatest man in all yours — though I dare say none 
of us here will ever be spared to see the day. 
The boy has a fine common-sense mind of his own, 
and where there's a mind to work upon, you can 
do anything, brother, within reason. With Jack- 
asses, of course you must give them the stick to 
make them go the way you want; but with 
rational creatures, it's only a fool that believes 
blows can do more than logic. What first set you 
and me thinking about our duties in life, Josh ?" he 
asked, and gave the dice-box an extra rattle as he 
paused for a reply. " Was it kicks, eh? kicks and 
cuffs ? No ! but it was sitting under good old Luke 
Fuller at the Northampton Conventicle, and listen- 
ing to his godly teachings — that it was, if / know 
anything about it. And now I'll tell you what I 
mean to do with my godson Ben. I've made my- 
self responsible for the errors of his youth, you 
know, and what I mean to do is this — " 

The mother stopped her needles for the moment, 
as she awaited anxiously the conclusion of the 
speech ; but Benjamin, who by this time had got 
by far the best of the hit at backgammon, paused 
to watch the result of the throw he was about to 
make ; and when the dice were cast upon the 



70 YOUNG BENJAMIN FRANKLIN. 

board, Josiali, who, like his brother, was divided 
between the discourse and the contest, inquired — 

" Well, and what do you mean to do, Master 
Ben?" 

" Why, I mean to gammon you nicely this time, 
Master Josh," he replied with a chuckle as he 
"took up" the "blot" his antagonist had left on 
the board. 

"Tut! tut! man alive," returned Josiah in a 
huff at the ill luck which pursued him. "But 
what do you mean to do with the boy, I want to 
know ?" 

" Why, I mean," answered brother Benjamin, 
abstractedly, as the game drew to a close, and he 
kept gazing intently at the board, " I mean " — and 
then, as he took off his last man, and started up 
rubbing his palms together as briskly as if it were 
a sharp frost, with exultation over his victory, he 
added — ■•* But you shall see — you shall see what 
I mean to do with him. Come, that's a hit to me, 
brother." 

It was useless for Josiah or his wife to attempt 
to get even a clue to the method Uncle Benjamin 
intended to adopt with their son. 

The godfather, on second thoughts, had judged 
it better to keep his mode of proceeding to him- 
self, and so, finding he could hardly hold out 
against the lengthened siege of the father and 
mother, he deemed it prudent to beat a retreat ; 
and accordingly, seizing his rushlight and the 
volume of manuscript sermons, that he never let 
out of his sight, he wished the couple good-night, 
and retired to his room. 



71 



CHAPTEE IX. 

THE WILL AXD THE WAY. 

A small sailing vessel lay becalmed next morn- 
ing far out in the offing of the Massachusetts bay. 
The fresh breeze that had sprung up at sunrise 
had gradually died away as the day advanced 
towards noon, and now the mainsail hung down 
from the yard as loose and straight as a curtain from 
a pole, while the boom kept swinging heavily from 
side to side as the boat rolled about in the long 
and lazy swell of the ocean. At the helm sat one of 
the smartest young cockswains out of Boston har- 
bour — Young Benjamin Franklin ; and near him 
was the uncle who had undertaken to shape the 
little fellow's course through life. 

The lad was again at a loss to fathom the reason 
of the trip. 

So long as the breeze had lasted he had been 
too deeply engrossed with the management of the 
craft — too pleased with watching the bows of the 
tiny vessel plough their way through the foaming 
water, like a sledge through so much snow — to 
trouble his brains much about the object of an 
excursion so congenial to his heart. So long as 
the summer waves rushed swiftly as a mill-sluice 
past the gunwale of the boat, and the hull lay 
over almost on its side under the pressure of the 
pouting sail, the blood went dancing, almost 
as cheerily as the waves, through the veins of 
the excited boy ; and his hand grasped the tiller 
with the same pride as a horseman holds the rein of 



72 YOUNG BENJAMIN FRANKLIN. 

a swift and well-trained steed. But when the wind 
flagged, and the sail began to beat backwards and 
forwards with each lull in the breeze, like the 
fluttering wing of a wounded gull, the little fellow 
could not keep from wondering why Uncle Benja- 
min had brought him out to sea. What could any 
one learn of the ways of the world in an open boat 
far away from land ? 

The boy, however, lacked the courage to inquire 
what it ail meant. 

Presently he turned his head to note the dis- 
tance they had run, and cried as he looked back 
towards Boston, " Why, I declare, uncle, we can 
hardly see the State House !" 

"Yes, lad," was the answer, u the town has 
faded into a mere blot of haze ; but how finely 
the long curving line of the crescent- shaped bay 
appears to rampart the ocean round, now that the 
entire sweep of the shore is brought within grasp 
of the eye ! What a vast basin it looks : so vast, 
indeed, that the capes which form the horns of the 
crescent coast, seem to be the very ends of the 
earth itself! And yet, vast as it looks to us, lad, 
this great tract of shore is but a mere span's length 
in comparison with the enormous American conti- 
nent ; that continent, which is a third part of the 
entire earth — one of the three gigantic tongues of 
land that stretch down from the North Pole,* and 
ridge the ocean as if they were so many mighty 
sea-walls raised to break the fury of the immense 
flood of water enveloping the globe. Now tell 

* The three tongues of land spoken of are, — 1, North and 
South America ; 2, Europe and Africa ; 3, Asia and Austra- 
lasia. Each of these great tracts is more or less divided mid- 
way into two portions. Between the two Americas flow the 
Gulf of Mexico and the Caribbean Sea ; between Europe and 
Africa, on the other hand, runs the Mediterranean ; whilst 
Asia and Australasia are separated by the Chinese Sea and 
Indian Archipelago. 



THE WILL AND THE WAY. 73 

me, who was it that discovered the great continent 
before us, Benjamin ?" 

" Cristcfaro Colombo, the Genoese sailor, on the 
11th of October, in the year 1492," quickly answered 
the nephew, proud of the opportunity of displaying 
his knowledge of the history of his native land. 

" And that is but little more than two hundred 
years ago," the other added. " For thousands of 
3 7 ears one third of the entire earth was not even 
known to exist by the civilized portion of the globe ; 
and had it not been for the will of that Genoese 
sailor, you and I, Ben, most likely, would not have 
been gazing at this same land at this same moment." 

"The will of Columbus!" echoed the nephew 
in wonderment at the speech. 

" Yes, boy. I have brought you out in this boat 
to-day, to show you what the mere will of a man 
can compass," continued the uncle, " for I want 
to impress upon you, my little fellow — now that 
we are here, with the mighty American shore 
stretching miles away before our eyes — how the 
will of a simple mariner gave these mighty shores 
an existence to the rest of the habitable globe." 

" The will !" repeated the boy. 

"Yes, Benjamin, the will!" the uncle iterated 
emphatically; "for the finding of this great 
country was not a mere accidental discovery — not 
a blind stumbling over a heap of earth in the dark 
— but the mature fruition of a purpose long con- 
ceived and sustained in the mind. When did 
Columbus first form the design of reaching India 
by a westward course?" asked the old man, de- 
lighted to catechize his little godson concerning the 
chronicles of America. 

Young Ben reflected for a moment, and then 
stammered out, as if half in doubt about the date, 
"As early as the — as the year 1474, I think the 
book says, uncle." 



74 YOUNG BENJAMIN FRANKLIN. 

"Yes, boy, he formed the design nearly twenty- 
years before be made tbe discovery. To reacb India 
by sea," proceeded tbe mentor, " was tbe great 
problem of navigation in those days. Marco Polo 
had travelled overland as far even as China and 
Japan; but the boats of our forefathers, flat- 
bottomed as they were, and impelled only by 
oars, were unable to venture far out of sight of 
land; for in those days sailors hadn't even the 
knowledge of the compass, nor of any instrument 
to measure the altitudes of the stars, whereby to 
guide a vessel in its course. Even the passage to 
India round by the Cape of Good Hope was a 
voyage that none as yet had had the hardihood to 
undertake. Well, and what were the reasons 
Columbus had for believing that land lay across 
the Atlantic ?" 

" The objects cast on the shores of Europe after 
westerly winds," spoke out the boy, for the 
interesting story of the discovery of America had 
been scanned over and over again by him. 
" Besides, you know, uncle, after Columbus married 
Philippa de Palestrello, he supported himself, and 
kept his old father too, at Genoa by drawing 
maps and charts." 

" There's a brave lad !" returned the uncle pat- 
ting his godson encouragingly on the head, till 
each kindly touch from the old man thrilled 
through every nerve of the youngster ; " and in the 
old charts by Andrea Bianco and others of Yenice, 
Columbus had doubtlessly been struck by the long- 
range of territory that was vaguely indicated as 
lying to the west of the Canary Islands. Well, 
when the sailor had once formed the idea of cross- 
ing the Atlantic in quest of land, what did he 
do ? Did he sit down and grieve that he was too 
poor to fit out the fleet that was necessary to put 
the project into execution, eh, lad ?" 



THE WILL AND THE WAY. 75 

' ; Xo, uncle, " was the read}' reply ; "he journeyed 
with his little son Diego, who was then, if I 
remember rightly, only eleven years old (for 
his wife Philippa, yon know, uncle, had died 
some time before), to the different courts of 
Europe, in the hope of getting some of the kings 
to give him ships and men for the voyage." 

"Ay, and when he found himself foiled by the 
intrigues of the courtiers of John the Second of 
Portugal, and the great scheme of crossing the 
Atlantic rejected by the council of the State, did 
the sailor give way to despair, and abandon the 
project for ever in disgust ?" again the old man 
interrogated the youth. 

" Xo, Uncle Benjamin ; he set out with his little 
son to Spain, though in the greatest poverty at 
the time, and there sought the assistance of Ferdi- 
nand and Isabella." 

" And how long did he remain there, lad, danc- 
ing attendance on the lacqueys of a government, 
many of whom even laughed to scorn the notion 
of the world being round ?" was the next query. 

"Five years he stayed in Spain," the youth 
replied. 

" And when all hope failed him there, what did 
he afterwards ? Did he lose heart, and pluck his 
long-cherished purpose out of his mind ?" 

"No, no!" exclaimed the lad, whom the uncle 
had now worked up to a sense of the sailors 
indomitable determination; " Columbus then got 
his brother Bartholomew to make proposals for 
the voyage to Henry VII. of England." 

" Yes," exclaimed the elder Benjamin, " and to 
England this man of stern will would most as- 
suredly have gone had not the Queen Isabella, 
when she heard of it, been persuaded to send for 
him back." 

" And then, you know, she consented to pledge 



76 YOUNG BENJAMIN FRANKLIN. 

her jewels so as to raise money enough for the 
expedition," chimed in little Benjamin. 

" So she did, my little man," the godfather re- 
turned with an approving nod; "and by such 
means, at last, three small vessels, the ' Santa 
Maria,' the ' Pinta,' and the ' Nina' (two of them, 
remember, being without decks), were fitted for 
sea, and one hundred and twenty hands to man 
them, collected, by hook or by crook, with the 
greatest difficulty, owing to the general dread 
of the passage. And when the tiny fleet of fish- 
ing smacks (for it was little better, boy), ulti- 
mately set sail — on the 3rd of .August, 1492, it 
was — out of the port of Palos, in the Mediter- 
ranean, and made straight away for the broad 
havenless ocean itself, did the will of the bold 
adventurer — the will that he had nursed through 
many a long year of trial, want, and scorn — did it 
waver one jot then, or still point to the opposite 
shore, steady as the compass itself to the pole ? ay, 
and that even though he knew that the crew he 
commanded were timid as deer, and the boats 
he had to navigate almost as unseaworthy as 
cradles ?" 

" I never read the story in this way before, uncle," 
exclaimed the thoughtful boy, now that the object 
of his teacher began to dawn upon his mind. 

" I dare say not, lad ; but hear the grand tale to 
its end," was the answer. "Well, for some months, 
you know, Ben, the wretched little fleet of open 
boats had been beating about the wide and appa- 
rently-boundless Atlantic, and the sailors, worn 
with fatigue and long want of shelter and proper 
food, had grown mutinous and savage at searching 
for what seemed to them like the very end of space 
itself; and then the great admiral (for you re- 
member he had been made one), though still 
fortified by the same indomitable purpose as ever, 



THE WILL AND THE WAY. 77 

was obliged, after exhausting every other resource, 
to beg of his rebellious sailors a few days' grace, 
and to promise to return with them then, if un- 
successful. Night and day afterwards, did this 
man of iron resolution gaze into the clouds that 
rested on the horizon, and believe he saw in them 
the very land that his fancy had discovered there 
nearly twenty years before ; but at last this same 
cloud-land had so often cheated the sight, that all 
hope of seeing any shore in that quarter had been 
banished from every breast — but his own. One 
night, however, — the memorable night of the loth 
of October, 1492, — as the admiral sat on the poop 
of the ' Santa Maria ' peering into the darkness 
itself, he thought he beheld moving lights in the 
distance ; then the crew were called up to watch 
them, and eye after eye began to see the same 
bright fiery specks wandering about in the haze 
as the admiral himself; until, at length, doubt 
grew into conviction, and a wild exulting cry of 
4 land ! land !' arose from every voice. 

And when the morning dawned, and the eyes 
of Columbus gazed upon that strange coast, crim- 
soned over and gilt with the rays of the rising 
sun, who shall describe the passions that crowded 
in his bosom ? who shall tell the honest pride he 
felt at the power of the will which had led him 
to summon, into existence as it were, the very 
land before him? or how even he himself mar- 
velled over that staunch fortitude of purpose 
which had sustained him through years of trial to 
such an end ?' 

" It teas then," said the boy, half stricken down 
with wonder at the thought, now that he could 
grasp it in all its grandeur, " the will of Columbus 
that gave America to us." 

<; It was, lad, the will of the heroic Genoese 
sailor — expressing the will of God ; and if it was 



78 YOUNG- BENJAMIN FRANKLIN. 

the will of a simple mariner that first made known 
this enormous continent — this new world as we 
call it — why, it was merely the same inflexible 
resolution that first peopled it, with the very race 
that now possesses it." 

" Indeed !" cried the boy in greater amazement 
than ever. 

"Yes, Ben," was the answer. " The same iron 
determination was in the souls of the Pilgrim 
Fathers as in that of Columbus himself; but theirs 
was one of a holier nature. They sought these 
lands, neither quickened by a life of adventure 
nor stirred by the lust of riches. They had merely 
one immovable purpose in their heart — to worship 
the Almighty after the dictates of their own con- 
science — and it was this that led the pious band 
to quit the shores of the Humber in the old coun- 
try ; this that sustained them for years as exiles 
in Holland ; and this which ultimately bore them 
across the Atlantic in the ' Speedwell ' and the 
'Mayflower/ and gave them strength to fight 
through the terrors of the first winter here in 
their adopted father-land." 

"How strange!" exclaimed the musing lad; 
" will discovered the land, and will peopled it." 

"Yes, Benjamin; it was to make you compre- 
hend the power of this same will in man that I 
brought you out here to-day. I wanted to let you see 
almost with a bird's eye the mighty territory that 
has been created by it. The plains, which a few 
years back were mere wild and half-barren hunt- 
ing grounds possessed by savages, are now studded 
with large and noble towns — the fields striped 
with roads and belted with canals — the coast 
pierced with harbours — the land rich with vegeta- 
tion — the cities busy with factories —the havens 
bristling with shipping — ay, and all called into 
existence by the indomitable will of the one man 



KOW TO MAKE WORK PLEASANT. 79 

who originally discovered the country, and that 
of the conscientious band who afterwards came 
from England to make a home of it. It was the 
will of the Almighty that first summoned the 
land out of the water, lad; and it is the same 
God-like quality in man — the great creative and 
heroic faculty — that changes barren plains into 
fertile fields, and builds up cities in the wilder- 
ness." 



CHAPTEE X. 

HOW TO MAKE WORK PLEASAXT AXD PROFITABLE. 

It was now time for the uncle and nephew to 
think about returning to Boston harbour. They 
had promised to be home to a late dinner at two ; 
but the promise had been made irrespective of the 
wind and the " tide, and the couple were then 
some miles out at sea, without a breath of wind 
strong enough to waft a soap-bubble through 
the air, and with a strong ebb-current drifting 
them farther from land. 

The head of the vessel was at length, by dint of 
sculling, brought round to the shore ; but still 
the sail hung down as limp and straight as the 
feathers of barn-door fowls after a heavy shower, 
and even the paper that the uncle threw over- 
board (as he opened the packet of bread and 
meat they had brought with them) floated per- 
petually by the ship's side, as motionless as the 
pennant at the mast-head. 

" Heyday, my man ! we seem to be in a pretty 
fix here," cried Uncle Benjamin, as he munched 
the bread and beef, while he kept his eyes 
riveted on the piece of the old "Boston Gazette" 
swimming beside them in the water. " What do 



80 YOUNG BENJAMIN FRANKLIN. 

you say, my little captain — what's to be done ? 
Eemember, I'm in your hands, youngster." 

" There's nothing to be done that I see, uncle," 
returned the youth, as he smiled with delight at 
the idea of being promoted to the captaincy of the 
vessel — " nothing but to wait out here patiently 
till sundown, and then a breeze will spring up 
most likely ; it generally does, you know, at that 
time. But I thought it 'ud be so, to tell you 
the truth, while you were talking ; and I should 
have whistled for a wind long ago, but I 
fancied you might think I wasn't attending. 
It's impossible to pull back with this heavy tide 
against us ; and if you look out to sea, uncle, 
there isn't a puff of wind to be seen coming 
up along the water anywhere ;" and as he said 
the words the little monkey put his hand up 
before his brows, in imitation of his old sailor 
friends, and looked under them in all directions, 
to observe whether he could distinguish in the 
distance that ruffling of the glassy surface of the 
water which marks the approach of a breeze in a 
calm. 

" Well, captain, what must be must" said the 
godfather, calmly resigning himself with all the 
gusto of a philosopher at once to the position and 
the victuals. " There's no use railing against 
the wind, you know, and it's* much better having 
to whistle for a breeze than a dinner, I can 
tell you. So come, lad, while you fall foul of 
the meat and the cider, I can be treating you to 
a little snack of worldly philosophy by way of 
salt to the food; and so, you see, you can be 
digesting your dinner and your duty in life both 
at the same time." 

The youngster proceeded to carry out his 
uncle's order in good earnest, for the sea-trip 
had whetted his bodily appetite as much as the 



HOW-TO MAKE WORK PLEASANT. 81 

story of Columbus had sharpened the edge of 
his wits ; so, pulling out his clasp knife, he fell 
to devouring the buffalo hump and the old man's 
discourse almost with equal heartiness. 

" Well, my son/' proceeded the elder Benjamin, 
M I have shown you the power of the will in 
great things, and now I want to point out to you 
the use of it in what the world calls ' little things.' 
I have made you understand, I think, that the 
piime necessity of life is labour. But labour 
is naturally irksome to us. You remember, boy, 
it was the primeval curse inflicted upon man." 

" So it was !" exclaimed the lad, in haste to 
let his uncle see that he knew well to what he 
referred. " * In the sweat of thy face shalt thou 
eat bread' were the words, uncle." 

" Good, good, my son ! I'll make a fine, upright 
man of you before I have done — that I will," 
added the delighted godfather. ". But labour, 
though naturally irksome and painful, still admits, 
like hunger itself, of being made a source of 
pleasure to us." 

" How can that be?" the nephew inquired. 

"Well, Ben," the uncle went on, "there are 
three means — and only three, so far as I know — by 
which work may be rendered more or less de- 
lightful to all men. The first of these means is 
variety ; the second, habit ; and the third, purpose, 
or object" 

" I don't understand you, uncle," was all the 
boy said. 

" You know, my little man," the other went 
on, " that as it is hard and difficult to remain 
at the same occupation for any length of time, so 
does it become a matter of mere recreation to 
shift from one employment to another as soon 
as we grow tired of what we have been previously 
doing. Child's-play is merely labour made easy, 

G 



82 YOUNG BENJAMIN FRANKLIN. 

and what boys call amusement is often veiy hard 
work. But it is the change of occupation that 
makes even the severest muscular exercise a 
matter of sport to youth. A whole life of 
football, however, or fifty years at leap-frog, 
would be far more fatiguing, I can tell you, 
than the hewing, of wood or the drawing of 
water. And even this boating, which is so 
delightful to you, lad, when pursued as a re- 
laxation or relief from other modes of work, is 
the heaviest possible punishment to the poor 
galley slaves who are doomed to it for the term of 
their natural lives. The great zest of life is 
change, boy; even as the chief drug of our 
existence is the mental and bodily fatigue which 
arises from long continuance at the same pursuit. 
Eecreation, indeed, is merely that restoration of 
energy which comes from change of work or 
occupation ; and it is this principle of change 
or variety in labour which, as with the boating 
of boys, can transform even the hard work of 
galley slaves into a matter of child's play." 

" Oh, then, uncle/' cried little Benjamin, 
flushed with the belief that he had made a grand 
discovery, " why not let people work at a number 
of different things, and do each for only a little 
time, instead of setting them to labour always 
at the same pursuit for the whole of their lives ? 
Every one would ~befond of working then." 

"Yes, but, lad," rejoined the old man, smiling 
as well at the simplicity as at the aptness of his 
pupil, " this flighty or erratic kind of labour 
would be of no more value to the world than are 
the sports of children. A tailor must continue 
using the needle for years, Ben, before he can 
work a button-hole fit to be seen. How long 
must people have toiled on and on, generation 
after generation, before they learnt how to make 



HOW TO MAKE WORK PLEASANT. 83 

window-glass and bottles out of the sand and 
the weeds by the sea-shore ! Conld you or I. 
Ben, ever hope, by labouring half an hour a day, 
to get a pair of scissors or a razor out of a lump 
of iron-stone, or to fashion a slice of an elephant's 
tusk into the exquisitely-nice symmetry of a billiard 
ball ? For labour to be of special use and value 
to the world, it must have some special skill ; and 
skilled labour, being but the cunning of the fingers, 
requires the same long education of the hands 
as deep learning does of the head. It is because 
savages and vagabonds have no settled occupations 
that their lives are comparatively worthless to the 
rest of mankind." 

M I see now !" ejaculated the thoughtful boy. 

" Yes, my lad, variety of occupation makes work 
as pleasant as play," the uncle added ; " but it 
makes it as valueless also. So now let us turn to 
the second means of making labour agreeable." 

" And that's habit , I think you said," inter- 
jected the younger Benjamin. 

" I did," he replied. " Now habit, I should 
first tell you, my little man, is one of the most 
wonderful principles in the whole human consti- 
tution. The special function of habit is to 
make that which is at first irksome for us to 
do, pleasant after a time to perform : it serves 
to render the actions which originally required 
an express effort on our part to execute, so purely 
mechanical as it were (when they have been 
frequently and regularly repeated for a certain 
period), as to need almost the same express effort 
then to prevent us indulging in them." 

" How strange!" mused the nephew. 

" The simple habit of whittling will teach you, 
lad, how difficult it is for people to keep their 
hands from doing work they have been long 
ccaustomed to. Again, when you were trying 

g 2 



84 YOUNG BENJAMIN FRANKLIN. 

to play your father's violin, you remember how 
hard you found it to move each finger as you 
wanted, and how your eye was obliged to be fixed 
first on the music-book, and then on the strings, 
in order to touch each particular note set down ; 
until at length, disgusted with the tedium of the 
task, you left off practising on the instrument 
altogether ? And yet, had you pursued the study, 
there is no doubt you would ultimately have 
played with all the ease, and even pleasure, of 
your father, and have got to work your fingers 
ere long with the same nimbi eness, and even the 
same inattention, as your mother plies her knit- 
ting-needles while reading in the evening." 

"Sol should, I dare say ; but isn't it odd, 
uncle, that mere habit should do this ?" observed 
the lad, as he grew alive to the wonders worked 
by it, 

" It is odd, my boy — very odd, indeed, that the 
mere repetition of acts at frequent and regular 
intervals (for that is all that is required) should 
make them, however difficult and distasteful at 
first, grow easy and congenial to us in time ; that 
it should change pain into pleasure, labour into 
pastime ; that it should render a certain set of 
muscles unconscious of effort, and callous to 
fatigue, and transform the most arduous voluntary 
actions into the simplicity and insensibility of 
mere clockwork. But so it is, my little man; 
and it is this same principle of habit applied 
to the different forms of manual labour which 
constitutes what is termed ' industrial training ;' 
it is this which makes ' skill ' in the world, and 
gives to the handiwork of mechanics a stamp of 
the cunning and dignity of art." 

" The use of apprenticeship, then, I suppose," 
observed the boy, "is to form a kind of habit of 
working in a particular way — isn't it so, uncle ?" 



HOW TO MAKE WORK PLEASANT. 85 

"Well said, my quick little man. There is a 
high pleasure in teaching such as take delight 
in learning, like you, Ben." 

" But, uncle," continued the youth, tingling 
all over with delight at the applause, " if habit 
can do away with the unpleasantness of labour, 
where can be the use of the other thing you spoke 
of as a means of making work agreeable — though 
I forget what you said it was, I'm sure." 

" It was purpose or object, my lad, that I told 
you makes work pleasant also." 

" Oh, yes, so it was — purpose or object," young 
Benjamin repeated ; " but I hardly know what 
you mean by such grand words." 

" They are not only grand words, but they 
stand for the grandest things in life, my little 
fellow," the old man went on. " Habit, after all, 
makes a man work but as a machine. The 
blacksmith who has . been long accustomed to 
wield the sledge hammer has no more sense of 
fatigue (except when he works beyond the time 
he has been used to) than that wonderful new 
invention the steam-engine, which you have seen 
swinging its iron arms about as it pumps the 
water out of our docks. But a man with a pur- 
pose, my son, works like a man, and not like a 
steam-engine — even though that very purpose 
makes him as insensible of weariness in his labour 
as the steam-engine itself." 

" Does purpose, then, as you call it, do the 
same as habit, uncle ?" inquired the youth. 

"Yes, Ben, but it does that immediately which 
habit requires years to accomplish. Only let a 
man put his whole soul into what he is doing — 
let him work, so to speak, lad, with his heart in 
his hand, and the toil is instantly made a high and 
grand delight to him. This is the wonderful effect 
of the will, Ben. What you will to do, you must 



86 YOUNG BENJAMIN FRANKLIN. 

of course do willingly, and therefore more or less 
easily ; and labour is especially repulsive when 
your will wants to be oft' working at one thing 
while your hands are constrained to be toiling at 
another. Those who are without purpose in life, 
boy, are vagabonds either in body or spirit, for if 
there be no settled object there can hardly bo 
any settled pursuit. Such people, therefore, fly 
from this to that occupation, according as the 
caprice of the moment may happen to sway them : 
they are like empty bottles, lad, cast into the 
great ocean, far away from land, destined to be 
buffeted about by the winds and the waves of every 
passing storm, and driven whithersoever the cur- 
rent of the time may chance to carry them. With- 
out some enduring purpose, boy, there can be no 
enduring work ; and, after all, it is continuity in 
labour, or long persistence at the same pursuit, 
that masters every difficulty, and beats down 
every obstacle. The power of the sturdy sand- 
bag you know, Ben, is far greater than that of the 
impetuous cannon-ball." 

"How wonderful!" was all the little fellow 
could say, as he mused over what he heard. 

The uncle went on — " But I want to show you 
now, lad, Jiovj it is that the will can produce in 
an instant the same wondrous changes as habit 
does in years; and I want to do this so as to 
impress the matter deeply and indelibly on your 
mind. I have pointed out to you what great 
things will can accomplish in the world, and I 
now wish to let you see how easily and pleasantly 
it can accomplish them." 

" I should like to hear that, uncle," said the 
attentive boy ; "for as yet I can hardly under- 
stand what you mean." 

" Of course you cannot comprehend in a 
minute, Ben," the old man replied, "principles 



HOW TO MAKE WORK PLEAS AST. 87 

that have cost philosophers years of study to 
arrive at. But I will try and make the operation 
of will in man more plain to you. Now I pointed 
out to you yesterday that animals differ from 
plants — in what respect, lad ?" 

" TVhy, in going after their food instead of 
having it brought to them, uncle/' was the ready 
reply. 

" Yes, my child, but animals go after their food 
because, as I said, the power of moving has been 
given to them, while plants have no such faculty. 
Nothing, however, can move without a cause. 
This boat stops, you see, directly the propelling 
force ceases ; and the movements of animals, and 
even men, inexplicable as they may seem to you, can 
proceed only from the operation of uniform motive 
powers. You of course have never asked yourself 
what it is that moves men to act as they do." 

" I'm sure I never gave that a thought as yet, 
uncle," the boy replied frankly. "But now I 
come to turn it over in my mind, it seems to me 
as if nobody could tell as much." 

" Indeed, lad : let us see. Well, Ben, innu- 
merable as are the movements continually going 
on in the human frame, they all admit of being 
resolved into three kinds — according as they 
are preceded or not by some particular feeling. 
In the first place, our muscles may move like the 
machinery of a mere automaton, or, in other 
words, without any feeling at all. Our heart beats 
and our lungs expand continually, without our 
being even conscious of the incessant action going 
on within us— ay, and what is more wonderful, 
without the least sense of fatigue being connected 
with the work." 

" Isn't it strange," Benjamin exclaimed, "that 
our heart never gets tired of moving, like our 



88 YOUNG BENJAMIN FRANKLIN. 

" Yes, and isn't it as kind as it is strange, my 
lad, that such should be the case ?" the uncle re- 
minded his pupil ; " but our muscles not only move 
automatically, without any preceding feeling ; but 
they move also instinctively — that is to say, in con- 
sequence of some feeling which immediately pre- 
cedes and gives rise to the motion. Any sudden 
pain, such as a burn upon the finger, for instance, 
causes you involuntarily to contract the muscles 
of the injured part, and to withdraw the limb 
directly from the object wounding you. Again, if 
you are surprised or startled by any unexpected 
circumstance, your whole body is drawn back, 
and your hands thrown up immediately, to ward 
off the fancied danger ; ay, and that, too, long before 
you have time to think about what it is best to do, 
or even to obtain any knowledge as to the nature 
of that which has alarmed you. Such muscular 
movements, however, are wholly involuntary — that 
is to say, they are not left to the slow operations 
of our will to conceive and carry out ; but, being 
necessary for our preservation, in common with 
that of animals, they have been made matters of 
instinct with us as with them ; or, in other 
words, ordained to follow immediately upon a 
particular feeling existing in the mind." 

" Is animal instinct, then," inquired the lad, as 
he pondered over and repeated his uncle's words, 
" merely a certain kind of muscular movement made 
to follow immediately upon a particular feeling ?" 

" That is all, my son," was the reply. " The 
bird builds its nest, not with any thought of the 
young she is destined to rear, but merely in con- 
sequence of a vague sensation that is on her at the 
time. The squirrel lays up a store of nuts for the 
winter, not because it foresees a decrease of the 
summer stock, but simply in obedience to the 
feelings and promptings of its nature." 



HOW TO MAKE WORK PLEASANT. 89 

<; I see now," mused the youth, as he turned 
the new truths over and over in his mind. 

M But the muscles of man, my child, have been 
made to move, not only instinctively, or, what 
amounts to the same thing, involuntarily, according 
to the dictates of mere animal nature, but they 
have been made to move also voluntarily — that is 
to say, in obedience to the suggestions and deter- 
mination of the will. Bishop Cranmer — you know 
who he was, Benjamin ?" 

cc Oh, yes !" cried the youth ; " I know ; he was 
one of the martyrs, burnt with Eidley and Lati- 
mer opposite Baliol College at Oxford, in Old 
England, and he held his hand in the flames at 
the stake, uncle, because, as he said, ' it. had 
offended him in writing contrary to his heart ;' 
and he had solemnly declared at St. Mary's 
Church, that ' if he came to the fire that hand 
should be punished first.' " 

"Well said, my good little fellow, " cheered 
the godfather ; " but didn't Cranmer feel the same 
pain from the flames, think you, and the same 
animal instinct to withdraw his hand from them 
as we ourselves should have felt ? and yet it was 
by the determined effort of his will that he kept it 
there, in defiance of the promptings of his animal 
instincts, as he cried aloud, ' This unworthy hand ! 
this unworthy hand ! ' and forced it to burn and 
char before the rest of his limbs. Can you see 
now, Benjamin, what is the use of will in man?" 

" I think I can, uncle ; but do you tell me, and 
let me hear whether I am right," he answered, for 
the boy was afraid to trust himself to frame his 
thoughts into speech. 

" Well, lad," Uncle Benjamin replied, " the high 
and noble use of man's will is to control or guide 
the animal instincts of his nature." 

" I thought it was so from what you said about 



90 YOUNG BENJAMIN FRANKLIN. 

Craniner, uncle ;" and the lad fell musing over the 
subject in his own simple way, while the godfather 
paused to watch with delight the workings of the 
boy's mind, that, like a newly-fledged bird, was 
making its first attempts to fly. " So ! the use of 
man's will," the youth repeated over and over 
again to himself, in order to impress the words 
well on his memory, "is to control or guide the 
animal instincts of his nature." 

"But I say, my noble captain," cried the 
uncle, again waking up to a sense of their position r 
" are we really to remain here all day ? I could 
talk to you quite as well if we were moving on a 
bit, but this is sad slow work, my boy." 

" There's a strong ebb-tide on just now, uncle, 
and there's no making the least headway against 
that ; and, let me see — let me see," he mused, " it 
would have been high water in the harbour to-day 
at eleven, so it will be about five o'clock before 
the tide turns, you know," and the youngster 
shook his head, as much as to say he could 
discover no means of getting out of their diffi- 
culty. 

" Five o'clock ! — tut, tut ! and I wanted to 
have been at meeting at six." Then, as Uncle 
Benjamin gave vent to his impatience, he tugged 
from his fob a watch as big as the "bull's-eye" 
to a ship's scuttle, and cried, after looking well at 
the dial, and holding it up to, his ear to satisfy 
himself it was still going, " Why, it's not three yet, 
I declare." 

" Besides, you remember, uncle, the sun doesn't 
set now till long past five, and there's no chance 
of a breeze till then, I'm certain," was the only 
consolation the little captain could offer. 

" But are you quite sure of one at that time, 
you young rascal, eh ?" inquired the old gentle- 



BECALMED. 91 

man, in no little alarm at the idea of having to 
pass the night out at sea. 

4 * There generally is a breeze at sundown, you 
know, uncle," answered young Ben, delighted to 
display his nautical knowledge once more. 

"Well, all I can say is, I'm in your hands, 
captain — in your hands, bear in mind ; for, Heaven 
knows, I'm as ignorant as a sucking-pig of all that 
concerns the water;" and, so saying, the elder 
Benjamin abandoned himself with becoming resig- 
nation at once to the sourness of the circumstances 
and the cider. 



CHAPTER XI. 

BECALMED. 



For a while Uncle Benjamin silently grieved over 
the untowardness which prevented him adding 
the discourse of that evening to the three volumes 
of manuscript sermons that he had written out 
from notes taken in chapel, during their delivery 
by the most celebrated preachers of the day. His 
temper, however, was of too even and cheerful a 
quality to be any more ruffled than the water 
itself by the lack of wind ; so when he had drained 
the cider-bottle, he wrote in pencil on a slip of 
paper, " All well on board ■ The Lively Xaxcy,' 
off Boston, October 2nd, 1719 ;" and corking up the 
playful memorandum, flung the flagon with the 
note inside into the sea. 

" There it goes, Ben," he cried, as he watched 
the bottle dance up and down beside the boat, 
" without any more purpose to direct it than an 
idler. Where it will ultimately land, or what 
will be its end, no one can say." 

The lesson was not wasted on the youth ; so, 
stretching himself at full length on the seat oppo- 



92 YOUNG BENJAMIN FRANKLIN. 

site his uncle, he said, as he lay comfortably ar- 
ranged for listening, with his cheek resting on his 
hand, " You were telling me, uncle, about the use 
of the will, you know." 

" Well, lad, the function of our will," the old 
man resumed, "is to interfere between our feel- 
ings and our actions — to check in us some sudden 
propensity that has been prompted (either by the 
sense of a present pain or the prospect of a future 
pleasure), before it has time to stir the muscles. 
The will thus serves, you see, Ben, to stay the 
operation of our instincts, until the conscience has 
sat in judgment on the motives or consequences of 
the contemplated acts — until, indeed, it has pro- 
nounced them to be either ' right or wrong,' 
'prudent or imprudent,' for us to pursue. Nor is 
this all : for when the moral sense has duly de- 
liberated and determined, the will tends either to 
restrain the impulse, if it be thought bad, or else 
to encourage it, by giving additional force and 
persistence to it, if considered to be good." 

"I can hardly follow you," exclaimed the 
youth, trying to make it all out. 

'• You remember the trouble you got into, Ben, 
about reading ' Kobinson Crusoe ' ? " said his tutor, 
proceeding to give him an illustration ; " well, the- 
impulse that stirred you then to see what the 
shipwrecked mariner did in his desert island was 
but the natural result of a boy's instinctive delight 
in adventure ; but, though to you, lad, the pro- 
pensity seemed irresistible, had you brought your 
will to bear upon the matter, had you used its 
power to check the operation of the passion that 
was on you (till such time as you had asked your 
own heart whether you ought, or even whether it 
would be better for you to read at such a moment, 
in defiance of your father's commands), I am 
quite sure now what you would have determined, 



BECALMED. 93 

or, in other words, what you would have 'willed, 
to do." 

The little fellow hung down his head, in shame 
to find the error of his past conduct used as an 
illustration of the operation of a mere instinct, 
unguided and unrestrained by any superior prin- 
ciple. " I hope I shall act differently for the 
future, uncle," was all he could stammer out. 

" Let it pass, lad, let it pass," cried the old 
man; and accordingly he went on. "Xow it is 
principally in this wonderful faculty of will, 
Ben, that man differs from the rest of the animal 
creation. The most sagacious dog never pauses to 
reflect between its instincts and its acts — neither 
does it weigh the consequences of doing or not doing 
this or that thing, nor determine to act one way or 
the other, according as the action seems likely to 
be beneficial or hurtful to itself or ethers." 
" Of course it doesn't," interposed young Ben. 
" Again, it is will, my boy," the uncle continued, 
"that makes the chief distinction between the 
same human being waking or dreaming — in in- 
fancy or manhood — in a state of sanity or insanity. 
No one reproaches himself for his thoughts and 
feelings — base and savage as they often are — 
during either sleep or madness ; because at such 
times we have no more power than in infancy to 
deliberate on our impulses before giving way to 
them ; indeed, we have then neither the sense to 
judge whether they are right or wrong, nor the 
moral strength to encourage or restrain them. That 
our will really sleeps during slumber, you yourself, 
Ben, must be convinced, from the fact that in 
your nightmare dreams you are unable to move a 
limb, or even utter a cry for your protection ; and 
that simply because you, have then lost all power 
over the nerves and the muscles which, in your 
waking moments, never fail to answer directly to 



94 YOUNG BENJAMIN FRANKLIN. 

the will that is then aroused in you. It is this 
will, moreover, that makes ns responsible for our 
actions here ; for as we, unlike the other animals^ 
have been endowed with the power to reflect 
upon the tendency of our impulses — to see and 
weigh the consequences of our acts, and either to 
foster the good or reject the bad ; why it is but fair 
that our conduct in this respect should be judged 
both in this world and the next, my little man." 

" Oh, now I understand," exclaimed th.Q youth, 
" what has always appeared to me so hard to 
make out — why dogs and horses should not go to 
heaven as well as ourselves ! They have only 
instinct to guide them — isn't it so, uncle ?" 

" Yes, my boy," nodded the preceptor, " whilst 
we have conscience and will to direct and sustain 
us. But we mustn't wander from our object, 
which was — " and the old man paused to see if 
the lad, in the maze of thought through which he 
had led him, could find his way back to the point 
whence they started. 

" Let me see," pondered little Ben, " you were 
going to show me, uncle — but I'm sure I forget 
what now." 

" Why, I was going to show you, lad, how 
will or purpose makes work pleasant. Well then, 
my boy, I must tell you — what would appear at 
first sight to be opposed to such a result — that, 
with the operation of the will, there is generally 
connected a certain sense of effort; and every 
effort we make is more or less trying or irksome 
to us to sustain. If. you determine to lift a 
heavy weight, lad, you know how painful it is for 
you to exert your strength to its utmost, and who 
intensely fatiguing it is for you to continue doing 
so. Again you remember how with the violin, the 
irksomeness of having to move each finger by an 
express effort of your will at each different note 



BECALMED. 95 

soon made you grow weary of the task. With the 
Dperations of instinct, however, there seems to be 
little or no fatigue associated. The albatross, that is 
met with hovering in mid-ocean, far away from any 
land or even a rock, seems never to be tired of 
being on the wing ; gnats, too, appear to fly all the 
day long, and though their wings beat many 
times in a second — as we know by the musical 
note they give out — the muscles that move them 
are apparently as insensible of fatigue as those 
that stir our own heart." 

" How then, uncle, can the exercise of our 
will be made pleasant to us, since, as you say, 
there is always this sense of effort and fatigue 
connected with it?" inquired the boy, puzzled 
with the apparent contradiction. 

" Why, lad," returned the elder Benjamin, 
"such a result may be brought about, simply ,r bj 
using the will to strengthen the good and virtuous 
impulses of our nature, rather than to control the 
bad and vicious ones ; that is to say, by making 
the will work with us instead of against us. To do a 
thing that we have no natural inclination to do — 
to do it merely because our conscience tells us that 
it is right — is to perform an act of stern duty, and 
duty always demands more or less of sacrifice 
on our part. At such times there is a continual 
battle between the animal and moral parts of our 
nature ; the flesh struggles to go one way, the 
spirit another ; force has to be used against force, 
and hence a strong and continuous effort is 
required to sustain us. But our impulses are not 
all bad, Ben. If our instincts would lead us to 
hate and persecute our enemies, surely they teach 
us also to love and benefit our family and our 
friends ; if our appetites, lad, tend to make beasts 
of us, at least our sympathy with the suffering 
serves to give us something of the dignity of 



96 YOUNG BENJAMIN FRANKLIN. 

angels. The will therefore may be used as much 
to encourage and sustain our higher and kindlier 
propensities, as to restrain and subdue our more 
brutal and savage ones. A man's heart may 
prompt him to good works as well as evil ; and 
to will to do the good, in preference to the evil 
which our heart desires, is at once to work with all 
the heart and with all the soul as well." 

" I think I begin to see what you mean now, 
uncle," young Benjamin murmured half to himself. 

" There is no finer instance of the untiring 
energy of the will, my boy, when working in 
unison with the heart," the old man continued; 
" no more striking example of its wondrous 
power at such times to render even the heaviest 
labour light and pleasant to us — as well as to 
support us through trials, by giving us a capacity 
of endurance that seems to be almost insensible to 
suffering and fatigue — than is to be found in the 
career of Peter, the present Emperor of Kussia." 

Young Benjamin had heard his father and the 
chapel deacons, who often "dropped in" to 
converse with Josiah in the evening, refer occa- 
sionally, in the course of their political discus- 
sions, to the Eussian monarch as the royal 
wonder of their time ; but as yet the boy had 
been unable to gather more than that this same 
Peter was a king who had worked as a common 
shipwright somewhere. 

The mere mention of the great man's name, 
therefore, was sufficient to rouse the youngster 
from the seat on which he had been reclining at 
full length while listening to the "drier" parts 
of his uncle's discourse ; so he sat up on the 
bench with his elbows resting on his knees, and 
his chin pillowed on his palms, while he gazed 
intently in his uncle's face, eagerly waiting for 
the story he had to tell. 



BECALMED. 97 

" At ten years of age, lad," the old man began, 
"Peter came to the crown of Eussia; but the 
Queen-Eegent, Sophia, who was his half-sister, 
strove to keep him as ignorant as she could, as 
well as to make him idle and sensual, by placing 
the most debasing temptations in his way, and - 
withholding from him all means of instruction and 
refinement. The Queen-Eegent did this, not only 
to keep her brother from the throne as long as 
possible, but to render him utterly unfit for the 
exercise of royal power. The rude, ignorant, and 
self-willed boy, however, was "barely seventeen 
before he burst through the regent's control, and 
took the reins of government into his own hands. 
Then he set to work to educate himself, and 
mastered — entirely without tuition, Ben — a know- 
ledge of several foreign languages. He studied 
also many of the mechanical arts ; for, boy-king as 
he was, and unprejudiced by the luxurious train- 
ing of a court, he had too grand an idea of the 
dignity of labour, and too high a sense of the 
value, even to a monarch, of industrial knowledge, 
to consider such occupations either degrading or 
unfitted to him." 

" Wasn't it noble of him, uncle !" cried the 
enthusiastic little fellow ; " and how strange that a 
boy like him, without any schooling, should have 
such ideas !" 

" Peter had what is even better than education, 
Ben — better because it makes us educate ourselves, 
and gives us a firm reliance on our own powers," 
Uncle Benjamin made answer. 

" And what is that, uncle ?" inquired the 
simple lad. 

" Why, can't you guess, can't you guess, my 
clever little man? — a strong, persistent will," 
■was the reply. " The mechanic king had not 
only an instinct that made him conceive great 

H 



98 YOUNG BENJAMIN FRANKLIN. 

things without previous training, but a will that 
gave him zeal enough to undertake them — en- 
durance enough to labour long at them — and de- 
termined courage enough, come what might, to 
master them." 

si I see ! I see ! I see f" exclaimed the delighted 
boy, as he still gazed straight in his uncle's 
eyes; " I see that will is the greatest power in 
man." 

" Eussia, when Peter came to the throne," con- 
tinued the uncle, " possessed no seaport but that 
of Archangel, on the banks of the White Sea; 
and to give ships and commerce to his country 
soon became the one absorbing object of the boy- 
king's mind. Before his time the Russian people 
were merely a race of despised and barbarous 
Muscovites ; but hardly was the crown on his 
head, than the bold young czar had determined 
to create harbours, fleets, trades, manufactures, 
arts, and schools for the nation. Now what would 
you, Ben, have done under the same circum- 
stances — with such a purpose in your brain ? 
Imagine yourself a king, boy; with almost in- 
finite means at your command, with a palace for 
your home, and countless troops and serfs to do 
your bidding. How would you have set about 
such an undertaking ?" 

The youth could not help smiling at the idea 
of his coming even to an imaginary throne ; and, 
delighted to fancy himself possessed of such im- 
mense power in the world, he cried, exultingly, 
; ' Why, I should have set the people to work upon 
it, uncle, immediately." 

" Of course you would — like the rest of the 
world, lad," was the rejoinder. " But Peter was 
no ordinary man ; so, before setting the people to 
build ships for him, he resolved to learn how to 
build them for himself. And how do you think 



BECALMED. 99 

lie learnt the art, Ben — by having masters to 
teach him, eh?" 

The boy, ashamed of his previous mistake, re- 
mained silent this time. 

"Not he!" the uncle added. "A man of his 
will wanted no masters, lad. King though he 
was, there was but one way of making himself 
thoroughly and practically acquainted with the 
craft ; and that was by learning it as other men 
learn it — by working at it with one's own hands ; 
and the idea once formed, his was not the mind 
to be shaken from its object." 

" Did he then really labour as a common ship- 
wright, eh, uncle ?" timidly inquired the youth. 

t; Assuredly he did, lad — labour and live like 
a common labourer too. His heart longed to 
make his country a great commercial nation, and 
his will gave him strength and courage to accom- 
plish his purpose, as no monarch had ever done 
before. With his darling object deep in his heart, 
King Peter travelled as a private person to the two 
great maritime countries of the time, first to 
Holland, then to England ; and worked in the 
dockyards of Amsterdam and Deptford as an 
ordinary shipbuilder, living and faring like his 
fellow mechanics — his crown laid on one side for 
a paper cap, a flannel jacket and apron displacing 
his royal robes." 

Little Benjamin could only cry, " How won- 
derful ! how grand !" as the story went on. 

" And was the labour of such a life drudgery 
to such a man, think you, Ben ? No, lad ! rest 
assured, no ! Of all the workmen in those dock- 
yards, depend upon it, none toiled so zealously, 
none with so light a heart, so vigorous a hand, or 
with so little sense of fatigue as he who wielded a 
hammer instead of a sceptre. And why, Ben- 
jamin, was it so ?" 

H 2 



100 YOUNG BENJAMIN FEANKLIN. 

" Because he was working with his whole heart, 
as yon said, uncle, and with his whole soul too," 
the boy exclaimed, now fired with sufficient en- 
thusiasm almost to have started on the same 
mission himself. 

"Just so, my good little man," nodded his 
uncle, approvingly. " He was not labouring like 
a mere animal — bestirring himself only in quest 
of food ; but a high and noble purpose was fast 
in his mind — a strong and energetic will quicken- 
ing his muscles, and giving courage and vigour 
to his heart. It was the will within him, lad, that 
made the labourer-king do his work with scarcely 
an effort — this that kept him to the task day after 
day, and month after month, without any flagging, 
and with hardly a desire for rest — this that made 
his humble mechanic's home happier than a 
palace, and his simple mechanic's fare daintier 
than any royal banquet. So now, Ben, remember 
that of all the ways to make labour pleasant, and 
even valuable, there is nothing like having a noble 
purpose backed by a noble will." 

64 I shall never forget it, uncle — never," the 
youth replied, solemnly, as the lesson sank deep 
into his mind; " at least so long as I recollect the 
stories of Columbus and the Pilgrim Fathers, as 
well as that of Peter the Great." 

The lesson ended, Uncle Benjamin began to 
wake up, as it were, to a sense that he and his 
nephew were still miles away at sea, and without 
any apparent prospect too of being favoured with 
the promised breeze at sundown. 

" Come ! I say, captain," the uncle cried, as he 
glanced towards the shore, and beheld the sun, 
trembling like a huge golden bubble, as it seemed 
to rest poised on the very edge of the distant hills, 
and tinting the air, earth, and sea with a blush 



BECALMED. 101 

that was as faint and delicate as the rosy lining 
of a shell. " Come, I say, master, where's your 
breeze at sundown. I'm afraid you're out in 
your reckoning, my little skipper." Whereupon 
the couple looked again towards the horizon in the 
vain hope of discovering the slightest trace of 
what sailors call a "catspaw" on the water. 
Neither was there a single "goat's hair" nor 
" mare's tail" to he seen, like whiffs of gossamer, 
floating in the sky; for the clouds were still 
gathered into those large cumulus snow-clumps 
which are indicative of a summer stillness in the 
air, while the sea itself was so calm and smooth 
that it looked like a broad pavement of glass, more 
easy to be walked over than sailed through. 

The young skipper felt himself called upon to 
give his little breeches the true nautical hitch, as 
he informed his alarmed godfather that he " really 
didn't see what was to be done under the circum- 
stances — except, indeed, to whistle : for that was 
the remedy which the best sailors always pre- 
scribed for a lack of wind." 

" Whistle !" shouted Uncle Benjamin, as he 
laughed outright at the absurd though desperate 
predicament in which they were placed ; " and is 
that the result of all my long moral lessons to you 
this day, you young monkey r" and as he said the 
words he seized the lad and shook him playfully 
by the ear. "Have I been out with you here, 
ever since the morning, trying to hammer into 
your little noddle that will overcomes all diffi- 
culties, and yet you have faith now — only in 
whistling. Why, we may stop here the night 
through, and puff every gasp of breath out of our 
bodies before we shall get wind enough that way, 
you superstitious young rascal you, (and again 
he twiddled at the boy's ear), to drive even a 
walnut-shell through the water." 



102 YOUNG BENJAMIN FRANKLIN. 

" Well, but, uncle, it's impossible to pull all the 
way back to Boston," remonstrated the nephew ; 
and, as if to assure himself of the fact, he cast a 
despairing glance towards the coast, that now, as 
the twilight fell like a thick haze over the water, 
appeared even dimmer and more distant than 
before. 

" And you assert that as your deliberate opinion, 
eh, captain?" smiled the old man, as he bowed 
with mock deference to the youngster. 

"It certainly seems to me impossible," little 
Benjamin made answer, with a shrug of his 
shoulders expressive of utter helplessness under 
the circumstances. 

"I can only say, then, that I'm vastly glad to 
hear it, Master Ben," answered the uncle, chafing 
his palms together with pretended delight, " be- 
cause the very predicament we're in will afford 
you the finest possible opportunity of proving, in 
a practical manner, the power of the will in you ; and 
you'll learn from it, moreover, my lad, how it's 
much better to depend on that than on any power 
of whistling in such a position." 

" But, uncle, it's eight miles to Boston Harbour 
if it's an oar's length," remonstrated the faint- 
hearted youngster. 

" Never mind, boy. If it were twenty, but will to 
master the distance, and you'll find it only a hop 
skip and a jump after all. Come, lad !" cried the 
old man, slapping the little fellow on the back to 
rouse his dormant energy. " Have faith in your own 
powers — have faith, Ben ! for without faith there 
are no good works, I can tell you. It's easier, any 
how, to scull a boat than to build ships. Peter had 
the welfare only of his country to stir him to do 
what he did ; but you have father and mother to 
make happy by your brave deeds. Set your heart 
on home, boy ! and your hands will bring you there 



BECALMED. 103 

fast and readily enough. Have you no purpose to 
lighten the labour ? Is there no distant glory to 
rouse in you will enough to sustain you at the 
work ? Will it be no delight to your parents to 
find that you can be a fine noble fellow if you 
please ? that you have a man's purpose now in your 
heart, and a man's will in your soul? that you 
have no longer such a childish dread of continuous 
toil as to be cowed by a few ugly-looking diffi- 
culties. Let them see that you are ready to fight the 
battle of life with a courage that can never waver ; 
a resolution strong enough to change defeat into 
triumph ; an energy sufficiently enduring to make 
you compass what you set your heart upon ? Think 
of this, my little man, think of this ! and work to 
gladden father and mother, as King Peter worked 
to benefit a nation." 

" I'll do it ! I'll do it, uncle ! You shall see to- 
night what a man you have made of me. Ay ! 
and father and mother shall see it too." And 
without another word the little fellow proceeded 
to lower the sail, and then stripping off his coat, 
he seized the sculls, and began to give way in 
right good earnest. 

By this time, the lights of Boston city in the 
distance had come twinkling forth one after another, 
as if they had been so many stars peeping over the 
horizon ; and as the boy laboured at the oars, the 
uncle cheered him on, by reminding him of the 
moving lights that Columbus had seen on the 
shore in the night, as he sat on the poop of the 
" Santa Maria ;" and he bade him have the same 
will to reach those shores as had sustained Colum- 
bus himself. 

Kext he would tell the lad how John Huss, the 
martyr, had willed to die for the truth, and how 
the brave Bohemian had chanted hymns at the 



104 YOUNG BENJAMIN FRANKLIN. 

stake, while the flames were curling about his 
body. Then he would recount to him the story 
of Palissy, the potter, explaining to him that 
Palissy was the discoverer of the means of glazing 
earthenware — our cups, plates and dishes before 
his time having been as rude and rough as tiles — 
and that so determined had he been to succeed in 
his object, that he not only broke up the very bed- 
steads of his wife and children for fuel for his fur- 
naces, but burnt the flooring and rafters of the house 
they lived in ; until, at length, the potter mastered 
all the difficulties that beset him, and realized an 
immense fortune by the discovery. 

When, too, Uncle Benjamin fancied he could 
see the little fellow's spirit or strength beginning 
to flag, he would cry aloud to him, " Pull, lad ! 
pull as King Peter would have pulled under the 
same circumstances ;" or else the old uncle would 
make the little fellow laugh by telling him that 
he himself would try to help him, but he knew he 
should " catch a crab " the very first stroke, and 
be hurled backwards over the seat into the bottom 
of the boat. 

Then, these resources being exhausted, the old 
man tried to beguile the way to the boy, first by 
chanting hymns ; afterwards by reciting por- 
tions of " Paradise Lost," and next, by telling him 
stories about John Milton, the great Noncon- 
formist. 

It was, however, hard work enough for the little 
fellow to hold on ; and had not the tide been flow- 
ing, he must have given in or dropped before half 
of the distance had been travelled. 

Nevertheless, the boy laboured on and on, reso- 
lute in accomplishing the task. Indeed, his pride 
increased rather than flagged, as he drew nearer 
to the harbour lights ; so that when his uncle 
urged him to rest on his oars for a while, he 




A strong will can master aitiiculties which seem inroperaBta to 

a weak heart.— P. 105. 



BECALMED. 105 

scorned to listen to the suggestion, and fell to with 
redoubled vigour. 

Still the last half-mile was all — but more than 
little Benjamin could manage. His hands were 
smarting with blisters, and the muscles of his 
arms and back aching with their long exertion. 
Many a time he thought he must drop the sculls. 
Nevertheless he could not bear to be beaten after all 
he had done ; so on he went again, looking round, 
almost at every other stroke, to note how much 
farther he had to go. 

Then the old man, seeing the struggle of the poor 
boy, fell to cheering him, first clapping his hands 
and crying "Bravo! bravo, captain!" and then 
calling him " Peter the little " and " young Master 
Cristofaro," till the little fellow was obliged to 
laugh even in his pain. And after that he told him 
to think of the grand story he should have to tell 
his father and mother on reaching home, about his 
young friend Captain Benjamin Franklin — as to 
how he had saved his old uncle by his great courage 
and energy, as well as fine seamanship, from being 
drifted out of si^ht of land at nightfall without 
either provisions or water. 

Thus, at last, the harbour was gained. 

And when the little hero stepped from the boat 
on to the landing-place, he felt, though his arms 
were cramped with the long labour, that he was 
really a new man ; that he had learnt for the 
first time in his life to have faith in his own 
energies, and had found out by experience that 
a strong will can master difficulties which seem insuperable 
to a weak heart. 



106 YOUNG BENJAMIN FRANKLIN. 



CHAPTER XII. 

A NEW WOKLD. 

" Hoi, Ben, hoi ! we'll stop here, lad ! stop, you 
wild young jackanapes — stop, I say !" shouted the 
uncle through his hands to his young fellow- 
traveller, who had started on ahead, as they 
burst from out the dusk of a dense wood into 
the bright sunshine of a vast open plain. 

The long luxuriant grass of the broad mea- 
dows before them reached so high above the 
belly of the shock-coated pony young Benjamin 
was riding, that the little porpoise-like animal 
positively seemed to be swimming along in a sea 
of verdure. However, in obedience to the sum- 
mons, the boy leant back on the saddle, like a 
rower in his seat, as he tugged at the creature's 
mouth, and cried aloud " What, stop here, uncle — 
stop here /" 

Then wheeling round, he galloped back to 
the old man, and found him already hanging 
over the saddle, in the act of dismounting. The 
uncle paused for a moment with one foot in the 
stirrup ; and as he looked across the pommel at 
the features of the disappointed lad, he could 
hardly keep from laughing, on beholding his 
godson's face all lengthened out with wonder, 
almost as extravagantly as if it had been reflected 
in the bowl of a teaspoon. 

" Stop here!" iterated the amazed young Ben- 
jamin. "Why, there isn't a house for miles 
round ; just you look yourself, uncle ; you can't 



A NEW WORLD. 107 

see a curl of smoke anywhere about — can you 
now ?" And the youth leant his hand upon the 
crupper, while he turned himself sideways on his 
saddle, to look well back upon the scene. 

" I know, boy, there is not a homestead nearer 
than a day's ride," answered the godfather, still 
inwardly enjoying the fun of the boy's bewilder- 
ment, and patting on the shoulder, now that he 
was fairly dismounted, the old "nag-horse" that 
had borne him from St. Louis that morning. 
" Nevertheless, this is our journey's end, Master 
Benjamin." 

"This our journey's end! "Well, well!" the 
youth exclaimed in greater amazement than ever, 
as he tossed up his head, like a horse with a half- 
empty nose-bag ; and then drawing one foot from 
the stirrup, he screwed himself round once more 
on the saddle as upon a pivot, so as to take another 
good broad survey of the country. " Why, I 
thought you were going to show me some large 
town or other, uncle — or. some great shipping place 
— or grand farm, perhaps. But what your object 
can be in bringing me out here to an immense 
wilderness in the backwoods, I'm sure I can't 
tell ;" and the half-sulky lad flung himself off his 
pony, and stood almost up to his middle in the 
grass. 

Then, by way of consolation, he proceeded to 
hug the shaggy little steed round the neck, call- 
ing him the while his " darling Jacky," and ' ; a 
beauty," and telling the tiny creature, as he 
cuddled and caressed it like a human being, 
"-how happy he would be if Jacky only belonged 
to him, instead of the French farmer they had 
borrowed it from." 

"Patience, my little philosopher — patience! 
You shall know all in good time," was the simple 
rebuke of the godfather, while slipping the bridle 



108 YOUNG, BENJAMIN FRANKLIN. 

from his nag previous to turning hirn adrift in the 
herbage that was almost as high as corn. 

Little Benjamin proceeded to follow the old 
man's example, and having divested Jacky of his 
head-gear, he advanced towards his uncle with 
the bit dangling from his hand. Then, as the 
lad stood on tip-toe beside a neighbouring tree, 
trying to hang the bridle on the same branch as 
his godfather had used for the same purpose, he 
exclaimed, " But, uncle, you must allow I've had 
a good bit of patience already. Why, let me see ; 
we've been away from home now " (and he paused 
to make a mental calculation of the precise time) — 
" yes ! more than three weeks, I declare ; and 
though I did worry you, perhaps, a good deal at 
first — when we were in the sloop, you know, on 
our way from Boston to Annapolis — as to where 
you were going to take me, and why we were 
coming so far away from home ; still, you remem- 
ber, when I found you wouldn't tell me anything 
about it, but bade me have a little patience, 
as you do now, why, I never said another word 
to you on the matter; though I must confess I 
couldn't keep from twisting it over and over in 
my mind, all the time we were in that strange- 
looking old stage-waggon travelling over the 
Alleghany Mountains to Pittsburg ; and that was 
many days — wasn't it, uncle, eh ?" 

"Yes, you monkey! but you made up for it 
well — that you did — on board the * Ark,' that we 
came down the Ohio in," responded the tutor, as 
he shook his forefinger playfully in the face of 
the laughing lad ; " for then not a town appeared 
in sight but it was, ' Are we going to stop here, 
uncle?' ' Is this the place you wanted me to. see, 
uncle ? ' How long will it be before we get to our 
journey's end, uncle ?' ' What are you going to 
show me this time, uncle ?' and a thousand and 



I 



A NEW WORLD. 109 

one other knagging questions that would have 
given poor old Job himself an attack of the bile ?" 

" Well, I dare say I did tease you a bit, poor 
unky," replied the wheedling little fellow, as he 
sat down on the grass beside his godfather, and 
curled his arm about his neck, while, half 
abashed, he leant his head upon the old one's 
shoulder; "but you should remember I'm only 
4 a bit of a boy ' still, as-.mother says. Besides, 
you have such a strange way of teaching me 
things, you know — so different from old Mr. 
Brownwell ; though I'm sure he was kind enough 
to all of us boys in the school. First, you take me 
out fishing ; then we go boating together ; and 
though I fancied each time you meant merely 
to treat me to a day's pleasure, I found out after- 
wards that you had planned the trip only on pur- 
pose to give me some lesson in life." 

44 Yes, my dear lad," said the kind-hearted old 
gentleman, while passing his hand over the cheek 
of his young pupil; u I turned your recreations 
into matters of study. I used your boyish sport I 
as a means to show you what is a man's business 
m the world. Children remember their nursery 
rhymes better than their catechism, Ben, because 
the lesson is pleasanter ; and when the heart is 
in the work, the task, you know now, lad — " 

" Is always lightened," promptly added the little 
fellow, " I recollect, uncle, it was that which 
made the hard labour of the dockyard come so 
easy to Peter the Great. But still, unky dear, 
I really can't see what there is to be learnt in 
such a place as this." (The old man shook- his 
nead as he smiled at the boy's frankness.) " You 
said you were going to teach me how to get on 
in life, but what can I possibly learn of the ways 
of the world in a part that seems to be almost out 
of it — where there are no towns, no farms, no 



110 YOUNG BENJAMIN FRANKLIN. 

crops, no workshops, no shipping — nothing, in- 
deed, but the tracks of wild Indians, wild birds, 
and wild cattle ?" 

" I dare say, my little man, it does seem strange 
to yon," replied the nncle ; "and doubtlessly it 
will seem much stranger when I tell you that 
I have brought you all this long way from home 
— many hundreds of miles — to this vast unin- 
habited plain to teach you- " 

"What?" cried the eager boy, unable to wait 
for the conclusion of the sentence. 

" How to be rich, my son," was all the reply. 

" How to be rich !" cried the youth, even more 
bewildered than ever. " How to be rich! Oh, 
I should like to know about tTiat, uncle, very 
much," and, boy-like, he chuckled with delight at 
the prospect of getting plenty of money. " But, 
dear me ! this is an odd kind of place to come to 
for such a lesson. Why, there are no riches at 
all here that I can see — nothing but a great barren 
plain for miles and miles on." 

" Barren do you call it, you rogue !" echoed 
the tutor, still amusing himself with the per- 
plexity of his pupil. 

" Well, uncle, there is no corn growing, nor 
any turnip fields, nor kitchen gardens, nor any 
orchards either that I can see," explained young 
Ben. 

" True lad," replied the other, as he proceeded 
to spread out on the grass before him the packet 
of venison-hams and bread that he had brought 
from St. Louis for their gipsy dinner that day; 
"but, uncultured as it is, the finest English park, 
laid out with the nicest taste, and kept with 
the greatest care, is not more beautiful ; no farm, 
however well tilled, has soil so rich as that 
beneath our feet ; no meadows in the world are 
flocked with finer herds of cattle, or carpeted 



A NEW WORLD. Ill 

with a richer sward; no plantation is set with 
nobler trees or greener shrubs ; no squire's pre- 
serves in the old country are more abundant in 
game ; no florist's garden is studded with such a 
choice profusion of flowers as you behold here, 
spangling the earth, as thick as stars in the milky 
way; nor is any orchard better stocked with 
fruit, for yonder you see it dangles as in Aladdin's 
wonderful garden, like balls of - gold, and big- 
jewels from the boughs. 

" This is an American prairie, lad !" the old 
man went on — " one of God's own parks — crea- 
tion's broad manor, of which every man in a 
primitive state is ' iord ' — the noble estate which 
Xature entails on her barbarian children. Yonder 
are the beeves and the venison with which she 
welcomes her helpless offspring on their entry 
into the world; here the fruits with which she 
strews their board before they have learnt to grow 
them for themselves ; this the soft velvet carpet 
that she spreads for her barefooted sons, and these 
the flowers which she hangs, like bright beads 
and bells, about the cradles of her first-born." 

Young Benjamin had never seen a prairie be- 
fore. He had often read of the immense American 
plains, and often heard of them too from the 
neighbours and deacons who came to chat at his 
father's house in the evening ; he had heard of them 
also from his companions at school, while telling 
one another stories of the wild Indians and the 
wonders of the new country ; and from his brother- 
in-law, "the trader in furs and skins;" as well 
as from the sailors and mates whose acquaintance 
he had picked up at the Boston harbour. 

Boy -like, he had often longed to learn whether 
the reality in any way resembled the imaginary 
picture that repeated descriptions had conjured 
up in his mind. Up to this time, he had seen the 



112 YOUNG BENJAMIN FRANKLIN, 

great plains only, as it were, in a dream — like tiie 
image of a magic lantern gloaming faintly in the 
dark ; and now that the vast tracts themselves 
were spread before his eyes in all the vividness 
of sunshine, he was so intent upon learning his 
uncle's object in bringing him thus far from 
home, that until the witching word " prairie " fell 
from the old man's lips, the little fellow had no 
sense that he was gazing upon the grand Indian 
hunting-grounds for the first time in his life. 

But now the lad began to look upon them with 
different eyes, and grew eager to detect the many 
natural charms of which he had heard and read. 

As he glanced fitfully from spot to spot, he 
noted the several clumps of trees rising like 
woodland islets out of the boundless ocean of 
verdure which surrounded them — the long luxuri- 
ant grass undulating in the breeze, with waves 
that rolled across the plain, as if it were one vast 
liquid lawn, and that kept playing in the light, 
with all the rich, soft shades of moving velvet — and 
the gently swelling land heaving here and there 
in long, sweeping curves, like the sea in the lazy 
languor of a calm after a summer storm. 

As far as the eye could reach, the earth was 
one immense floor of meadows, vast as a desert, 
and yet rich as a garden, and planted like a park. 
The broad land was like an endless lake of fields, 
rather than the earth, as we ordinarily know it, 
broken into small patches, and hemmed in by hills 
and hedges. The prairies were a-flame with the 
myriads of bright-coloured wild flowers, that 
scintillated, as so many sparks of fire, in the 
waving grass ; amid which the yellow helianthus 
bloomed so luxuriantly that it threw a bright amber 
tint over the entire plains, and made them seem, at 
a little distance off, as gorgeous as a natural field of 
cloth of gold. 



A NEW WORLD. 113 

The prairie flowers, indeed, were of every scent 
and line ; there were the rich prairie violets, 
purpling the soil in positive masses of colour, and 
perfuming the air with luxurious daintiness ; the 
wild bean-flowers fluttering in the breeze like 
floral butterflies, and scattering, as they swung to 
and fro, a delicate odour of vanilla all around; 
the balls of white clover, shaped like fairy 
guelder roses, filling the atmosphere with a 
honeyed fragrance ; the slender rushes of the wild 
lavender, like little blue ears of corn, nodding re- 
dolently amid the blades ; the daisy-like camomile 
flowers, twinkling as though they were a galaxy 
of silver stars in the grass. In sooth, the rich 
soil was so pregnant with sweetness here that, at 
every tread of the foot, the fragrance of the crushed 
flowers — of all the infinite variety of little scented 
herbs — steamed np in rich gusts, and mingled 
with the other odours ; till the exquisite inter- 
blending of the several shades and grades of redo- 
lence made the air seem to be filled with a very 
rainbow of perfumes. 

Nor was the feast of colour less gorgeous. The 
waxen- stemmed balsams were of every hue, and 
looked like hundreds of little elfin maypoles gar- 
landed with many-coloured roses ; the foxglove, 
with its long stalk hung with bright purple bells ; 
the glowing crimson cnps of the monster cactus- 
blossoms, dazzling as heaps of burning coal ; the 
vivid amber tufts of the clustering honeysuckle — 
all made the earth sparkle with the brilliant tints 
of the kaleidoscope, and look as rich, with its 
hnndred hues, as the marigold window of some 
ancient cathedral. 

Then the prairie trees had a grandeur and a 
beanty unknown to other parts. Now they grew 
in circular clumps, and seemed like a broad tower 
of foliage springing from the soil. Here flourished 

i 



114 YOUNG BENJAMIN FRANKLIN. 

the gaudy tulip-tree, with its huge flowers, glowing 
among the leaves, bright as the tinted lamps upon 
a mimic Luther's-tree ; there was seen the stately 
cotton-tree, graceful as a Corinthian column, with 
the trumpet-flower twining up its stem, and the 
big scarlet blossoms swinging, like bells of red 
coral, in the air. The Judas-tree was there too, 
with its gorgeous hues ; and the Cornelian cherry- 
tree, with its yellow parachute-shaped flowers, 
and the red balls of fruit dangling beneath them ; 
and the beaver- wood as well, with its long, glossy, 
laurel-like leaves and its blush-white waxen 
petals ; and the papaw-tree, with its tall naked 
stem, spreading like a palm at the top, and its 
orange-coloured custard apples, like balls of gold, 
pendant from the blossoms. And besides these 
there were oak, and chestnuts, and sycamores, and 
black walnuts, and cypresses, and cucumber-trees, 
and locust-trees ; sometimes growing singly, and 
at others forming a copse or grove, or else fringing 
the banks of some narrow stream that traversed 
the great plain. 

The wild fruits, again, were as luxuriant as the 
wild flowers themselves. There were prairie 
plums, and wild grapes, and wild strawberries, 
and gooseberries, and hazel-nuts, and mulberries, 
and, indeed, a hundred other forest dainties, that 
were rotting for want of the hand to pluck them. 

Moreover, to complete the feast, there were 
wild fowl for ever flitting in long processions 
through the air. Now there would come a flock 
of wild turkeys sweeping overhead ; then a cloud 
of wild pigeons, thick as migrating swallows, 
would shadow the plain ; and these would be 
succeeded in a while by troops of long-necked 
geese upon the wing, or long-legged cranes, or 
huge wild swans, or else a dark multitude of wild 
ducks, or other water fowl. 



A NEW WORLD. 115 

Further, the plains themselves were dappled 
with herds of wild cattle. Far in the distance a 
black mass of buffaloes might be seen cropping 
the luxuriant herbage. Nearer, the deer, startled 
by the howl of the prairie dog, rushed, swift as 
a sheaf of rockets, across the scene. 

In one part were wild horses, thick as at a fair, 
grazing together; in another, a group of long- 
billed pelicans wading in the crossing streamlet. 

Nor was the lavish luxuriance of the prairie 
land to be wondered at ; situate as it was on the 
banks and near the mouths of the mightiest rivers 
in the world. For the soil of which the great 
plains had been formed had been worn from moun- 
tains and valleys, abraded from rocks and banks, 
hundreds upon hundreds of miles away ; and this 
had been washed and levigated by the waters that 
carried it down, till the finer particles alone re- 
mained suspended in the current ; so that the soft 
fat "silt" had been deposited there in atoms as 
minute as if myriads of ants had borne it thither 
for thousands of years. And thus the plains had 
grown and grown, layer by layer, and acre by acre, 
flood after flood — from the very starting-point of 
Time itself — till the alluvial soil had become rich 
and black as a bride cake, broad as a desert, and 
deep as a lake. 

And yet no human habitation was to be seen 
amid all this spontaneous luxuriance. The patches 
of burnt grass, and the litter of bleached bones 
here and there, told of some passing Indian camp. 
But beyond these, there was no sign of man's 
presence : as if the Lord of the Creation had yet 
to take possession of his richest manor ; for " there 
was not a man to till the ground " throughout the 
Eden of the New World. 



i 2 



116 YOUNG BENJAMIN FRANKLIN. 



CHAPTER XIII. 

HOW TO BE RICH. 

As young Benjamin sat munching his venison- 
ham on the grass, with the great prairie stretch- 
ing far and wide before him, he noted one after 
another the various phenomena of the scene. 
First his eyes would be riveted for a moment 
upon the endless string of wild fowl, sailing like 
a w T inged fleet overhead ; then he would watch 
some antlered elk that stood by itself staring into 
the distance ; next he would be taken wdth the 
bright balls of custard apples, dangling from the 
trees ; and the moment after he was plucking a 
bunch of the prairie violets, whose perfume came 
steaming up from the earth beside him ; or else he 
was chewing a cud of the honeyed clover at his 
feet. 

Presently he would be up and hurrying off to 
gather the wild plums that his uncle had directed 
his attention to ; and the next minute he'd 
come tearing back from the copse with his little 
three-cornered hat full of the fruit, together with 
bunches of hazel-nuts and grapes, and with pen- 
dants of cornelian cherries dangling from his ears, 
as well as a huge tulip-flower, almost as big as a 
golden goblet, stuck in his button-hole. 

The uncle, however, in the brief intervals be- 
tween the boy's flightier moods, pointed out to 
him such of the more latent beauties, connected 
with the scene, as might otherwise have escaped 
the youth's less observant eye. 



HOW TO BE RICH. 117 

It was a long time, however, before the restless 
lad was tired of running after every bright butter- 
fly novelty of the place— long, indeed, before he 
could be in any way sobered down into attention. 
The remains of the Indian camp had to be explored ; 
the papaw-tree to be half climbed ; the deer to be 
scared, in the vain hope of feeding them ; the wild 
ducks to be pelted in the air, in his eagerness to 
take a brace back home with him ; the tumulus, or 
Indian " barrow," to be scaled ; Jacky, the pony, to 
be petted and fondled ; and, indeed, a thousand and 
one boyish freaks to be gone through, ere Uncle 
Benjamin had any chance of being listened to, for 
more than a minute or two at a stretch. 

Nevertheless, the uncle knew enough of human 
nature to be aware that a boy's excitement is like 
summer lightning playing for a time in harmless 
fitful flashes, but lasting only while the heat is 
on. So he waited patiently for his pupil to cool 
down a few degrees, to something like " tem- 
perate ;" for, like a true artist, the old man was 
anxious to fix his impression while the scene itself 
was fresh before the eye. He sought to teach, 
indeed, as artists sketch, "from Xature ;" because 
he had long noted how strongly the associations 
of place serve to link together ideas in the me- 
mory. Hence, in all his counsellings he had ever 
one object in view, which was to make the lesson 
he desired to inculcate — not a mere flitting phan- 
tasm or shadowy ghost of a truth — but a principle, 
instinct with all the vigour of life itself; and to 
do this he sought to mix it up with some strange 
sight and event of boyhood. In a word, he strove 
to dramatize, as it were, what he had to teach, 
with all the real scenery of time and place ; and so 
to interweave it with the web of youthful ex- 
istence, that the mere recollection of the boyish 
adventure should serve to recall with it, in man- 



118 YOUNG BENJAMIN FRANKLIN. 

hood, the golden rule that he wished to Ibe for 
ever tableted upon the mind. 

At length, however, the bloom had been brushed 
off the novelty of the scene ; the charm of the 
"strange place" had lost its freshness with the 
familiarity of even an hour or two ; and the lad, 
who at first had run wild as a deer, startled by 
the strange objects about him, became ere long 
quiet and sedate as a lark at sundown. 

The tired boy lay stretched at full length in the 
tall grass, bedded in it, as if couched in a field of 
standing corn. The uncle, who sat with the little 
fellow's head pillowed on his lap, rested his back 
against the trunk of a huge "black walnut" tree 
that stood by itself on the plain as if it had been 
planted there ; while through the broad foliage, 
the glare of the southern sun came down, softened 
into the shade of a cool greenish light; except 
here and there, where the beams trickled between 
the leaves, and fell upon the sward in bright lus- 
trous goutes that flickered, amid the dusk of the 
bosky canopy, like a swarm of golden butterflies 
playing about the grass. 

The silence that reigned throughout the vast 
plain was so intense that it cast a half-solemnity 
over the scene. The faint murmur of the distant 
Illinois river was alone to be heard, and this came 
droning through the air with every gust, like the 
dying hum of a cathedral bell. The foliage above 
them, too occasionally rustled like silk, in the pass- 
ing breeze ; and now and then the scream of the 
water fowl, or the howl of the prairie dog, or 
lowing of far-off cattle, might be heard. But 
beyond these, the wide expanse was mute as the 
sea itself in the deepest calm : not the click of a 
woodman's axe — nor the moan of a cowherd's 
horn— nor the snap even of a distant rifle — no, 



HOW TO BE RICH. 119 

nor, strange to say, the piping of a single singing- 
bird, smote the ear. 

" Now, ray little man," began the uncle, " if 
yon will but listen to me for a while, yon shall 
learn, as I promised yon, how to be rich." 

The boy nodded, as he looked up and smiled in 
his uncle's face, as much as to say that he was 
ready for the lesson. 

" Well, you remember, Ben," he proceeded, 
;: that when we went out for our day's fishing, I 
showed you that work was the prime necessity of 
our lives ?" 

" Yes, uncle," exclaimed the youth from out the 
old man's lap ; " you said one of three things 
was unavoidable — either work, beggary, or starv 
ing ; I remember the words well." 

" That's right, my lad," rejoined the elder one, 
as he patted his little pupil's cheek till it glowed 
again with blushes; "but in such a place as this. 
Ben, there is no need of labour, nor any fear of 
starving either." 

The little fellow stared with amazement at the 
contradiction, and cried aloud, " Then why doesn't 
father give up that nasty candle-making, and 
bring mother and all of us out here to the prairies 
to live without working?" 

" Ay," replied Uncle Benjamin, with a sarcastic 
chuckle, "to live the life of savages, my boy — 
that would just suit your mother and Deborah, I 
know." 

" But why, uncle," again inquired the simple 
lad, " must we either work or starve in Boston, 
and not here ?" 

" Why, my son," the other made answer, 
" because here the earth is a natural garden, stored 
with more than a sufficiency for the supply of 
man's animal wants. Here, one has but to stretch 
his hand out, as it were, to get a meal ; but in a 



120 YOUNG BENJAMIN FRANKLIN. 

city, remember, the land bears bricks and mortar 
and paving-stones, rather than food. But even if 
corn grew in the streets, Ben, the soil of Boston 
couldn't possibly feed the people of Boston ; for in 
Boston city there are hundreds crowded upon 
every acre, so that each acre, however prolific, 
could yield but little more than a loaf a year for 
every mouth." 

"Oh! I see what you mean, uncle," said the 
nephew half to himself, as he turned the problem 
over in his mind : " you mean to say, I suppose, 
that there are so many mouths to feed in Boston, 
and so few in this enormous great place, that there 
is plenty to be got here without any hard work, 
and only just enough there with it." 

" I mean not only that, my little fellow," the 
old man returned, ' ' but what I wish you to under- 
stand is, that the very necessity for the hard 
work, demanded of man in a civilized state, arises 
from the number of people gathered together, in 
the different communities, being greater than the 
earth can naturally-*- -or, rather, I should say, spon- 
taneously — support. Here, however, the land 
yields, of its own free will, such a superabundance 
of natural wealth that man has hardly thought it 
worth his while to begin to appropriate any 
portion of it to his own individual use ; hence the 
only labour required in such a place as this, is that 
merely of collecting the riches, which Nature freely 
offers up to her uncivilized children. Here the 
fruit has but to be plucked, and the beasts of the 
field, or birds of the air, to be slain, to allay the 
cravings of the stomach ; so that a hunter's life is 
sufficient to satisfy the common necessities of 
human existence." 

"Oh, yes; and that's the reason, uncle, why 
these prairies are called the ' Indian hunting- 
grounds,' " exclaimed the younger Benjamin, with 



HOW TO BE RICH. 121 

no little deli glit, as the true significance of the 
phrase flashed across his mind. 

''You will understand then, my boy," the elder 
continued, " that so long as the children of Kature 
are few in number, and their mother-earth yields 
more than enough for each and all of them, there 
is no appropriation, no scrambling for the world's 
riches, no hoarding of them, no coveting of our 
neighbour's possessions, no theft, nor, indeed, any 
labour for man to perform, harder than that of 
gathering the superabundant food, as he may want 
it. Directly, however, the human family begins 
to outgrow the natural resources of the land over 
which it is distributed, then men proceed to 
seize upon the good things of the world, and 
garner them as their own special property ; while 
others strive to force the earth to yield by -cultiva- 
tion more than the natural supply ; so that the 
more savage members of the tribe fall to fighting 
among themselves, for the possessions obtained by 
their -brothers; and the more peaceable and sedate 
to raise, for their own use, fruits and grain that the 
soil otherwise would never have borne. Thus, 
then, you see, Ben, that as the world becomes 
peopled, and tribes pass from a. state of nature to 
civilization, there are developed two new features 
in human life — the one, the appropriation of what is 
growing scarce (for no one thinks of gathering and 
hoarding that which is superabundant) ; and the 
other, the production of artificial crops and riches, 
as a means of remedying the scarcity." 

" I think I can make out now what seemed so 
strange to me before, uncle," young Benjamin 
chimed in, as he lay looking up in the old man's 
face ; " the only work required of the wild Indians 
out here is that of gathering the fruits of the earth, 
whilst the farmers and others round about us have 
to -produce them." 



122 YOUNG BENJAMIN FRANKLIN. 

"Just so, lad; and whilst collection is the 
easiest form of work, production is a long and 
laborious process," added the tutor. 

" So it is," the boy made answer, as the differ- 
ence was clearly defined to him ; " it takes 
just a year for the harvest to come round, and 
a deal of work has to be done before that — eh, 
uncle T 

" Well then, Ben, the next thing to be con- 
sidered is, how are the labourers to live between 
the crops ?" said Uncle Benjamin, as he led his 
little pupil step by step through the maze of the 
reasoning. " Collection yields an immediate return 
to the labour ; but in production the producers 
must wait for the produce, and of course live 
while they are waiting." 

" Of course they must," echoed the youngster; 
" but then you know, uncle, they've got all the 
last year's corn to keep them." 

" Yes ; but suppose, my little man, some of 
them made their corn into cakes and pies and 
puddings, as well as bread, and so ate up all their 
stock before the harvest came round again — what, 
then, would be the consequence ?" inquired the 
uncle, watching the effect of the question upon 
the boy. 

"Why, then, they'd have to starve, of course," 
was the simple rejoinder, for the youth was still 
unable to detect the drift of the inquiry. 

" Ay, Benjamin, to starve ; or else to labour for 
the benefit of those who had been more prudent," 
answered the uncle, still gazing intently at the 
youth as he lay with his head pillowed on the 
old man's lap; " and thus civilized society would 
become divided into two distinct classes — masters 
and men, rich and poor." 

"Oh! I see," pondered the little fellow, as he 
woke up to the truth ; " the prudent people in the 



HOW TO BE RrCH. 123 

world become the rich., and the imprudent make 
the poor." But, presently, a doubt darted across 
his mind, and he asked, " But is it always so in 
Boston and other towns, uncle ? Are riches got 
only by prudence, and is imprudence the great 
cause of poverty ?'■ 

"I know what is passing through your brain, 
Ben," interposed the old man ; " and I should tell 
you that many persons are certainly born to 
riches, while many more inherit a life of poverty, 
lad. In most cases, however, the heritage is the 
result of their parents' or their forefathers' thrift, 
or the want of it. If your father, Ben, chose to 
make a beggar of himself, not only would he 
suffer, but you and your brothers and sisters 
would become hereditary beggars ; and, most 
likely, find it difficult in after life to raise your- 
selves above beggary." 

" Then the sins of the fathers," murmured the 
thoughtful lad, " are really ' visited upon the chil- 
dren, unto the third and fourth generation,' as it 
says in the commandment." 

"Yes, my little man !" the elder Benjamin added, 
" poverty is truly an ' estate in tail.' It descends 
from father to son ; and it is supreme hard work 
to ' dock the entail ' (as lawyers call it), I can tell 
you. As the mere casualty of birth ennobles the 
son of a noble, so, generally speaking, does it 
pauperize the son of the pauper. The majority of 
the rich have not been enriched by their own 
merits, boy, nor the mass of the poor impoverished 
by their own demerits. As a rule, the one class 
is no more essentially virtuous than the other is 
essentially vicious. The vagabond is often lineally 
descended from a long and ancient ancestry of 
vagabonds ; even as the proudest peer dates his 
dignity from peers before the Conquest. The 
heraldry of beggary, however, is an unheard-cf 



124 YOUNG BENJAMIN FKANKLIN. 

science. The patrician's pedigree forms part of 
the chronicles of the country ; but who thinks of 
the mendicant's family tree ? And yet, lad, the 
world might gather more sterling wisdom from 
the genealogy and antecedents of the one than the 
other. ' Who was the ..first beggar in the family ? 
How did he get his patent of beggary ? and how 
many generations of beggars have been begotten 
by this one man's folly or vice?' These are ques- 
tions which few give heed to, my son, and yet 
they are pregnant with the highest philosophy, 
ay, and the most enlightened kindness." 

The little fellow was too deeply touched with 
the suggestiveness of his uncle's queries to utter a 
word in reply. He was thinking how he should 
like to learn from the next beggar he met what 
had made him a beggar — he was thinking of the 
little beggar- children he had seen with their 
father and mother chanting hymns in the streets 
of Boston ; and wondering whether they would 
grow up to be beggars in their turn, and bring 
their little ones up to beggary also. 

" Moreover, I should tell you, lad," continued 
the uncle, after a brief pause, " that in the struggle 
of the transition of almost every race from a state 
of barbarism to civilization, possessions are mostly 
acquired by force of arms, rather than by industry 
and frugality ; for no sooner does the scrambling 
for the scanty wealth begin, than the strong seize 
not only upon the natural riches of the earth, but 
upon the very labourers themselves, and compel 
them to till the land as slaves for their benefit. 
But putting these matters on one side, boy, what 
I am anxious to impress upon you now is, that 
even supposing right, rather than might, had pre- 
vailed at the beginning of organized society, and 
all had started fairly, producing for themselves, 
why, long before the second harvest had come 



HOW TO BE RICH. 125 

round, some would have eaten up, and some would 
have wasted their first year's crop ; and these must 
naturally have become the serfs of those who 
had saved theirs. Thus, then, the same broad 
■distinctions as exist now among men would have 
sprung up, and the human world still have been 
separated into two great tribes — those who had 
plenty of bread- stuff, and those who had none ; 
while those who had no food of their own would 
be at the mercy of those who possessed a super- 
abundance ; so that not only would they be glad to 
be allowed to labour for the others' benefit, but 
even constrained to work for the veriest pittance 
that their masters chose to dole out to them." 

Little Benjamin remained silent, conning the 
hard bit of worldly wisdom that had been for the 
first time revealed to him. 

The uncle noticed the impression his words had 
made, and added, " Such, my little man, are the 
social advantages of prudence, and such the heavy 
penalties that men pay for lack of thrift in life. 
But before we proceed any further, Ben, let 
us thoroughly comprehend what this same pru- 
dence means." 

The boy stared at his uncle as he awaited the 
explanation. 

k ' In the first place, then," the godfather went 
on, "we must not confound prudence with miser- 
liness, nor even with meanness. To be miserly, 
my son, is as improvident as to be prodigal ; for 
to hoard that which is of use chiefly in being 
used — in being used as a means of further pro- 
duction — is as unwise as to squander it. To do 
this is to live a pauper's life amidst riches, and 
thus not only to forestall the beggary that true 
prudence seeks to avoid, but to waste the wealth 
(by allowing it to remain idle) that is valuable 
only in being applied as the means of future 



128 YOUNG BENJAMIN" FRANKLIN. 

benefit or enjoyment. To be mean, on the othei 
band, my lad, is to be either unjust or ignoble ; 
and enlightened worldly discretion would prompt 
us to be neither ; for there is no real prudence in 
ignoring the duties, the dignities, or even the 
charities of life." 

" Tell me then, uncle, what prudence really is" 
asked the boy, who was half bewildered now that 
he had learnt what it was not. 

" Why, prudence, my little fellow, is simply that 
wise worldly caution which comes of foresight re- 
garding the circumstances that are likely to affect 
our own happiness. Morally considered, it is the 
heroism of enlightened selfishness — intellectually 
regarded, it is the judgment counselling the heart ; 
whilst in a religious point of view, it is the divine 
element of ' Providence ' narrowed down to the 
limits of human knowledge and human vision. The 
learned man, Ben, exists mainly in the past ; the 
thoughtless one lives only in the present ; but 
the wise dwell principally in the future. And 
as the astronomer foresees the conjunctions of 
planets, the recurrence of eclipses, and return of 
comets, years ere they happen ; so the true sage, in 
the great universe of circumstances surrounding 
our lives, has a prescience of the coming good or 
evil, and makes the benefits of to-day serve to miti- 
gate the miseries of to-morrow." 

" Dear me !" cried the youth, amazed at the 
glowing picture his godfather had given of the 
virtue, " why, I thought prudence merely meant 
saving, uncle." 

" Ay, and you thought saving, doubtlessly," 
added the tutor, sarcastically, " but a poor and 
paltry good after all. Youths mostly do think so, 
Ben ; for it is but natural that to take any steps 
to avert the perils of old age, at a time when they 
are most remote, should appear to the inexperi- 



HOW TO BE RICH. 127 

enced as being — to say the least — most premature. 
Nevertheless, Ben, saving is one of the means by 
which prudence seeks to change unusual luck 
into uniform benefit ; to make the strokes of good 
fortune in the world so temper the heavy blows 
and disasters of life, that our days shall be one 
round of average happiness, rather than (as they 
otherwise must be) a series of intermittent joys 
and miseries. But not only is it by saving, lad, 
that the enormities of surfeit at one particular 
time, and of griping want at another, are converted 
into the even tenor of general sufficiency ; but 
without saving there could be no production of 
wealth in the world." 

4i How so, uncle ?" asked the younger Benjamin. 

" Why, boy," the other went on, " in order to do 
any productive work, three things are always 
necessary : first, there must be something to go 
to work upon ; secondly, there must be something 
to go to work with; and thirdly, something 
wherewith to keep the workman while working — 
that is to say, the workman, unless duly provided 
with materials, tools, and food, can do no work at 
all. A tailor, for instance, Ben, cannot make a 
coat without cloth, or needles and thread ; nor a 
carpenter build a house without a board, or a saw 
or plane ; nor a smith work without metal, or file, 
or hammer — nor, indeed, can any handicraftsman 
continue labouring without ' bite or sup ' as well." 

'* Of course they can't," assented the boy ; " but 
still I can't make out what that has to do with 
saving, uncle." 

u Simply this, lad," the godfather made answer. 
" Such things can be acquired only by husband- 
ing the previous gains, for if none of the past 
year's yield were to be set aside as stock or 
capital for the next year's supply — if none of the 
corn grown, for example, were to be saved for 



128 YOUXG BENJAMIN FRANKLIN. 

seed — none devoted to the maintenance of the 
smiths while manufacturing the implements where 
with to till the soil, and none laid by for the keep of 
the labourers while tilling it, there could not 
possibly be any further produce." 

u Oh, I see !" the youth exclaimed. " I've 
often heard father talk of the ' capital ' required to 
start a person in business, but hardly knew what 
he meant." 

" Yes, boy, I dare say," the other added ; " and 
now you perceive that your father meant by it 
merely the wealth that is required to make more 
wealth ; the stock that it is necessary to have in 
hand before any further supply can be raised. 
Capital, Ben, is nothing more than the golden 
grain which has been husbanded as seed for the 
future golden crop — a certain store of wealth 
laid up for the purposes of further production or 
of trade; and such store can be obtained, it is 
manifest, only by not consuming all we get. So 
absolutely indispensable, too, is this capital, or 
stock in hand, for carrying on the great business 
of life, that all who would be the masters of the 
world must themselves either possess a certain 
portion of it, or pay others interest for the use of 
it; while those who have none, and can get none, 
must needs be the labourers and servants of the 
others." 

" ' Interest !' " echoed young Benjamin, catch- 
ing at the word he had heard so often used in 
conversation at home ; but of which he had 
as yet scarcely formed a definite idea. " But 
don't some people, uncle, live upon the interest of 
their property without doing any work at all ? 
Father has told me so, I think ; and how can that 
be, if work, as you say, is the prime necessity of 
life?" 

" Ay, lad, we must either work ourselves or be 



HOW TO BE RICH. 129 

able to employ others to work for us," was the 
rejoinder; "and those who live on the interest of 
their money do the latter — but they do so in- 
directly ; rather than directly, like the real em- 
ployer himself." 

" I do not understand yon, uncle," was all the 
little fellow could say, as he knit his brows in the 
vain attempt to solve the worldly problem. 

" "Well, Ben," replied the old man, " I will try 
and make the matter plainer to you. The fund 
that it is necessary to have in hand, in order to 
supply the materials and implements (or, maybe, 
the machinery) required for producing a parti- 
cular commodity — as well as to provide the mainte- 
nance of the workmen employed in producing it — 
may either have been acquired by our own thrift, 
or it may have formed part of the savings of others. 
In the one case, of course, we alone are interested 
in the result ; in the other, however, it is but fair 
and right that they who supply us with the means 
of obtaining a certain valuable return should be 
allowed a proportionate share or interest, as it is 
termed, in the gains. If a portion of land be 
naturally more fertile than another — if, for 
instance, the fields in the valley yield, with the 
same amount of labour, a tenfold crop over and 
above those on the mountains, such extra fertility 
is, of course, a natural boon; and this natural boon 
must accrue to some one. Well, if the indi- 
vidual who has acquired the right to it do 
not till the fields himself, it is self-evident 
that he will not part with such right to others 
without reserving to himself some share or in- 
terest in the after-produce. Now this share or 
interest that the landlord reserves to himself, for 
the superior productiveness of certain lands, is 
what the world calls • rent ;' and your own sense, 
lad, will show you that a person possessing 

K 



130 YOUjTO BENJAMIN FRANKLIN. 

many such acres might live merely upon the 
interest he has in the crops that are raised upon 
them by others, rather than by raising any him- 
self." 

" Go on, uncle, go on ; I begin to see it a little 
plainer now," the youth cried, as the fog in his 
brain gradually cleared away. 

u Well, my good boy," proceeded the godfather, 
6i capital is as productive as land itself ; discreetly 
used, it yields crop after crop of profits ; and 
interest for money is but the rent or share that 
the wealthy reserve to themselves for the use of 
their property, when applied to productive pur- 
poses by others. And as the rent of a large 
number of acres cultivated by tenants may, as I 
said before, yield a person a sufficient income to 
live in ease and affluence without even the cares 
of conducting the work, or the responsibility of 
good and bad seasons ; so a man with many 
hundreds of guineas may leave the fructification 
of his capital to more active and enterprising 
natures, whilst he himself subsists in comfort 
upon that mere interest or indirect share in the 
gains which he claims for the use of his savings. 
If capital were as unproductive as barren land, 
no one would pay interest for the one, any more 
than they would dream of giving rent for the 
other. And as the scale of rent is equivalent 
merely to the comparative fertility of different 
soils, so the rate of interest expresses only the 
value of capital in the market, according to the 
individual risk or the general want of money." 

" I see ! I see !" exclaimed the youth, 

" Money makes money, boy," the godfather con- 
tinued ; "it grows as assuredly as the com grows, 
for the growth of the grain is but the fructification 
of the capital that has been applied to the land ; 
and if a hundred guineas sterling put into the soil 



HOW TO BE RICH. lol 

in the shape of seed, manure, and wages will yield 
at the end of the harvest a crop worth — say. a 
hundred and twenty guineas — sorely, then, the 
money (which, after all, is hut the ultimate crop 
reduced to its pecuniary value) has fructified at a 
corresponding rate with the blades themselves. 
A guinea allowed to remain idle, Ben, is as bad as 
land that is allowed to grow weeds instead of 
wheat. Every grain of corn eaten, lad, is a 
grain absolutely destroyed ; but every grain sown 
, yields an ear, and every extra ear adds to the 
common stock of food. In like manner, wealth 
squandered is so much wealth positively lost to 
the world ; whereas, wealth saved, and used as 
capital in some productive employment, serves 
not only to find work and subsistence for the 
poor, but to increase the gross fund of available 
riches in the community." 

;; It is good then to save, uncle," observed the 
boy. 

"It is as good to save and use wealth dis- 
creetly, my lad, as it is base to hoard and lock it 
up, and wicked to squander and waste it. Saving, 
indeed, is no mean virtue. Xot only does it re- 
quire high self-denial in order to forego the im- 
mediate pleasure which wealth in hand can always 
obtain for its possessors; but it needs as much 
intellectual strength to perceive the future good 
with all the vividness of a present benefit, as it 
does moral control to restrain the propensities of 
the time being, for the enjoyment of happiness in 
years to come. Again, boy, it is merely by the 
frugality of civilized communities that cities are 
built, the institutions of society maintained, and 
all the complex machinery of enlightened in- 
dustry and commerce kept in operation. If 
every one lived from hand to mouth, Ben, there 
could be no schools, nor libraries, nor churches, 

K 2 



132 YOUNQ BENJAMIN FRANKLIN. 

nor courts of justice, nor hospitals, nor senate- 
houses ; neither could there be any government, nor 
law, nor medicine, nor any religious or intellectual 
teaching among the people. For as such modes 
of life add nothing directly to the common stock 
of food and clothing, nor, indeed, to the gross 
material wealth of a nation, it is manifest that they 
who follow them can do so only at the expense 
of the general savings. Further, my lad, a mo- 
ment's reflection will show you that roads, and 
docks and shipping, and warehouses and markets, 
as well as factories and shops, together with 
all the appliances of tools and machinery, can 
only be constructed out of the capital-stock of 
the commonwealth ; so that the chief difference 
between the wild luxuriant hunting-grounds be- 
fore you and the great town of Boston in which 
you live, Ben, is that here even Nature herself 
is so prodigal, that nothing needs to be stored, 
whilst there everything has sprung out of a wise 
economy. There the very paving-stones in the 
streets are representatives of so much wealth trea- 
sured, literally, against * a rainy day,' and every 
edifice is a monument of the industry and frugality 
of the citizens ; there not a vessel enters the port 
but it comes laden with the rich fruits of some 
man's thrift and providence ; there not a field is 
tilled but it is sown with the seeds of another's 
forethought, and not a crop raised that is not a 
golden witness of the good husbanding of the 
husbandman ; there, too, the storehouses are piled 
up with treasures brought from the very corners 
of the earth to serve as the means of future em- 
ployment for the poor, and the banks sparkle 
with riches which, rightly viewed, are hut the 
bright medals that have been won by the heroism 
of hard work and self-denial in the great ' battle 
of life.'" 



HOW TO BE RICH. 133 

" Has all Boston, then, and all the ships in the 
port and goods in the warehouses," the boy said 
half to himself, " come out of the savings of the 
people ?" 

" Assuredly they have, lad," was the reply. 
" Just think how many pounds of bread and 
meat it must take to build a ship, and then ask 
yourself whether there could be a single vessel in 
Boston harbour if some one hadn't saved a suffi- 
cient store to keep the woodmen while felling 
the timber, and the shipwrights while putting it 
together. You see now the high social use of 
saving, Ben. It not only gives riches to the 
rich, remember, but it provides work and food for 
the poor ; for the prosperous man who duly hus- 
bands his gains benefits at once himself and those 
who have been less lucky or prudent than he. 
Nor is this all. Tt is by saving alone that a man 
can emancipate himself from the primeval doom 
of life-long labour. There are no other means of 
purchasing exemption from the ban. We are the 
born slaves of our natural wants — the serfs of our 
common appetites, and it is only by industry and 
thrift that we can wrest the iron collar from our 
neck. If, then, in the greed of our natures, we 
will devour all we get, we must either starve or 
become the voluntary villeins of those who have 
been more frugal than we. By prudence, Ben, 
I repeat, we may become the masters of the 
world ; by imprudence, we must remain the 
bondsmen of it. In a word, you must save — or 
be a slave, lad." 

" Save, or be a slave," the boy kept on murmur- 
ing to himself, for the words had sunk deep into 
his soul. " Save, or be a slave." 

Presently little Ben woke up out of the dream 
into which the burden of the song, so to speak, 
had thrown him, and he asked: — "But, uncle, 



134- YOUNG^BEXJAMIN FRANKLIN. 

can people become rich, only by saving. I have 
beard father speak of persons having made large 
fortunes in a short time ; and when you told me 
that story about Bernard Palissy the potter (you 
remember, uncle," he interjected with a smile, 
"on the night when we were becalmed and I 
rowed you to Boston harbour), I thought you said 
Bernard made — oh, a great, great deal of money ! 
merely by finding out how to glaze earthenware." 

"Well said, my child, well said!" nodded the 
godfather ; " and that reminds me that I should 
tell you there are two different and opposite modes 
of becoming rich : the one slow and sure, and the 
other rapid and uncertain; the first is .the process 
of patient industry and wise prudence ; the second 
that of clever scheming and bold adventure. A 
man may certainly invent rather than earn a 
fortune for himself ; he may stumble upon a gold- 
mine, without even the trouble of hunting for it ; 
or he may discover some new mode of production, 
as Gutenberg, the inventor of movable types did ; 
or he may insure a vessel that is supposed to be 
lost, and see the ship the next day come sailing 
into the harbour ; or he may speculate for a rise 
in the market-price of a particular commodity, 
and realize thousands by the venture ; or he may 
buy a ticket in a lottery, and wake up some morn- 
ing and find himself the lucky holder of a twenty- 
thousand guinea prize ; or, indeed, he may do a 
hundred and one things by which large sums of 
money are, occasionally, obtained as it were in an 
instant." 

" Oh, then!" cried the lad, " where's the good, 
I should like to know, of going through years of 
hard work, and stinting and saving, in order to 
get rich, if it's possible to make one's fortune in 
an instant, as you say. I know what / shall do," 
he added, as he sprang to his feet, and faced about, 



HOW TO BE RICH. 135 

elated with the thought — " I shall try and dis- 
cover something, as Palissy the potter did, and 
get a good lot of money by it, all in a minute." 

'-Ay, do!" gravely responded the tutor, "and 
you will be a mere schemer your life through, 
and find yourself most likely a beggar in the end." 

"Well, but, uncle," expostulated the youth, 
" don't you yourself say some people have done 
such things ?" 

" Yes, boy, some have, certainly," was the reply ; 
" but in such matters, Ben, success is the one 
splendid exception ; disappointment, failure, and 
beggary the bitter and uniform rule. In all the 
lotteries of life, the chances are a million to one 
against any particular adventurer drawing a prize. 
Some one will be the lucky wight assuredly, but 
then nine hundred and ninety-nine thousand 
and nine hundred and ninety-nine others will as 
assuredly get blanks. It is only fools who trust 
to accidents or chance ; the wise submit to rule : 
and the golden rule of life is that scheming and 
adventure fail a thousand fold oftener than they 
succeed ; whereas industry and prudence succeed 
a thousand fold oftener than they fail. The one 
mode of amassing wealth," continued the old man, 
"may be tempting from its seeming rapidity, but 
it is far more disheartening in the end, lad, from 
its real uncertainty; whilst the other mode, if 
alloyed with the inconvenience of being slow, has 
at least the crowning comfort of being sure." 

" I see ! I see what you mean now," ejaculated 
little Ben, thoughtfully. 

" Well then, do you understand now how to be 
rich, my little man?" the teacher inquired. 

" Oh, yes, uncle," cried the youth, delighted to 
let his tutor see how well he had understood him ; 
" by living on less than we get." 

The godfather smiled as he shook his head, as 



136 YOUNG BENJAMIN FRANKLIN. 

much as to say the lad was at fault somewhere. 
" That is only one part of the process, Ben," 
presently he said. " To live on less than we get 
is merely to hoard, and hoarding is not husband- 
ing. To husband well is at once to economize and 
fertilize ; it is not only to garner, but to sow and 
to reap also. The good husbandman does not 
allow his acres to lie for ever idle ; but he uses 
and employs all his means with care, and in the 
manner best suited to produce the greatest yield. 
To be rich then, my little man, we must not only 
work and get, and live on less than we get, but — 
but what, Ben?" 

" We must use and employ, as you call it, 
uncle, what we save," was now the ready reply. 

" Eight, lad," the old man continued ; " we must 
make our savings work as well as ourselves, in 
order to make them useful. Nothing, indeed, can 
be rendered productive without work, and a pound 
becomes a guinea at the year's end, merely because 
it has been used as the means of giving employ- 
ment to those who had not a pound of their own 
to go to work upon." 

u But, uncle," exclaimed the lad with eager- 
ness as a seeming difficulty suddenly crossed his 
mind, "how are people to live on less than they 
get if they don't get enough to live upon ?" 

" Ah, Ben, it is that same phantom of ' enough' 
which is the will-o'-the-wisp of the whole world," 
answered the old man. " The boundary to our 
wishes is as illusive as the silver ring of the 
horizon to a child at sea : it seems so near and so 
like the journey's end ; and yet, let the bark speed 
on its course day after day, and the voyage be as 
prosperous as it may, there it remains the same 
bright, dreamy bourne — always apparently as close 
at hand, and yet always really as distant from the 
voyager as when he started. There is no such 



HOW TO BE EICH. 137 

quality as enough, lad, in the world. We might 
as well attempt to wall in all space as to limit the 
illimitable desires of human nature. The ca- 
jDacious stomachof man's ambition and avarice is 
never surfeited. The merchant prince has no 
more enough than the pauper ; and the man who 
delays saving because he has not enough to live 
upon will never have enough to save upon. Let 
us get never so little, at least some little, even of 
that little, may be laid by, if we will but be frugal ; 
and a store once raised, and duly husbanded, will 
soon serve to change the little into more. If we 
have not sufficient moral control to keep our 
desires within our means in one station of life, 
depend upon it, lad, such is the expansibility of 
human wishes, that there will be the same lack 
of self-restraint in any other.* The really prudent 
are prudent under all circumstances ; and those in 
adversity who wait for prosperity to give them 
the means of laying up a fund for future ease, may 
wait for ever and ever ; since prosperity can come 
only through the very means they are idly waiting 
for. The main object of all saving is redemption 
from poverty, and the poorer the people, the 
greater the reason for their pursuing the only 
course that can possibly bring riches to them, and 
emancipate them from the misery that is for ever 
hanging over them, like a doom. It maybe hard, 
Ben, to save under griping necessity, but every 
penny husbanded serves to relax the grip ; and, 
hard as it is, we must ever bear in mind that 

* Benjamin Franklin, the hero of the present book, lived 
to exemplify how little is required for the satisfaction of 
man's wants. His diet, when he was working as a journey- 
man printer in London, consisted merely of 20 lbs. of bread 
a week, or a little more than half a quartern loaf per diem, 
with water, as the French say, a discretion ; and this regimen 
he submitted to, principally, in order to be able to purchase 
books out of the remainder of his wages. 



138 YOUNG BENJAMIN FRANKLIN. 

there is no other loophole in the world by which 
to escape from want to comfort — from slavery to 
independence. " 

"Ay, nncle, it is as you said, we must save or 
be a slave," returned the little fellow. " I shall 
never think of the prairies without remembering 
the words." 

The lesson ended, it was nighttime for the 
horses to be resaddled; for, already, the long- 
shadows of the solitary clamps of trees had be- 
gun to stripe the emerald plains, the black bands 
contrasting with the golden-green of the sward — 
burnished as it seemed now with the rays of the 
setting sun — till the meadows shone with all the 
belted brilliance of a mackerel's back. And as 
the couple set out on their journey homewards, 
the little fellow followed, almost mechanically, in 
his uncle's track ; for he was still busy as he 
jogged along, revolving the hard truths he had 
learnt for the first time in life, and muttering to 
himself by the way, " Save ! save ! or be a slave." 



CHAPTEE XIY. 

AN ALARM. 



There was a loud knocking at the shop-door of the 
candle store at the corner of Hanover and Union 
Streets, in the city of Boston — a knock that 
sounded the louder from the lateness of the hour 
and the utter stillness of the streets at the time. 

The Puritan family were on their knees in the 
little back parlour, engaged in their devotions 
previous to retiring to rest for the night ; so the 
summons went unheeded. 



AN ALARM. 139 

" We pray Thee, Lord," continued tlie 
father, as lie offered up tlie usual extemporaneous 
prayer, and proceeded to ask a blessing for the 
last member of his household, before concluding 
the family worship — "to bless our youngest child, 
Benjamin. Watch over him, God ! — " 

Again the noisy summons interrupted the sup- 
plication, but still the prayer went on. 

u And so strengthen him with Thy grace, that 
he may grow up to walk in Thy ways for the rest 
of his life ; and if his body or his soul be in peril 
at this moment, grant, grant, we beseech Thee, 
that the danger may be only for the time." 

"Amen!" fervently exclaimed the mother, 
raising her head from the cushion of the beehive 
chair before which she was kneeling. 

Again the knocking was repeated, and this time 
so vigorously that the mother and Deborah both 
stalled back from their chairs, and would have 
risen from the floor, had they not seen that Josiah 
paid little or no regard to the disturbance. 

Hoi did the father move a limb (though the 
noise at last continued without ceasing) till he had 
besought the customary blessing on all his neigh- 
bours and friends, and even his enemies too. 

Immediately the ceremony was finished, Dame 
Franklin jumped up and cried, <; Who ever can 
want admission here at such a time of the night?" 

Deborah was no sooner on her feet than she ran 
to her mother's side, and clung close to her skirt 
as she watched her father move leisurely towards 
the outer shop-door. 

" Be sure and ask who it is before you undo the 
bolt, Josh !" screamed the wife in her alarm ; but 
the words were scarcely uttered, ere the voice of 
Uncle Ben was heard shouting without, " What, 
are you all gone to bed here, eh ?" 

On the door being opened, the younger Benjamin 



140 YOUNG BENJAMIN FRANKLIN. 

flung himself into the arms of his father, and 
smothered the old man's words with kisses, while 
the mother and Deborah no sooner caught the 
sound of the well-known voice than they rushed 
forward to take part in the greeting. 

Then came a volley of questionings — " Where on 
earth have you been to ?" " What have you been 
doing with yourselves all this time ?" " Why 
didn't you say you should be so long gone when 
you started ?" " Don't you think it was high 
time for us to get alarmed about you?" " What 
have you seen, Ben ?" asked Deborah, on the sly. 
" However did you manage for clean clothes?" 
chimed in the mother. " You surely must have 
run short of money," interrupted the father. 

But the greeting over, the boy, who since dusk 
had been asleep on board the sloop that had 
brought him and his uncle to Boston, was too 
tired with the long voyage to enter into the many 
explanations demanded of him ; and though the 
mother, mother-like, " was sure he was sinking 
for want of food," young Ben showed such a 
decided preference for bed to bread and cheese, that 
Dame Franklin at length hurried the drowsy lad 
and his sister to their chambers for the night, 
while she herself stayed behind to spread the cold 
corned-brisket and cider for her brother-in-law. 

As the uncle munched the beef, he carried the 
parents as briefly as possible through the several 
scenes of his long journey with the boy : and 
when he had borne them to the Western Prairies, 
he ran over the heads of the lesson he had 
impressed upon the youth there. Nor did he 
forget, as he brought them back home again, to 
gladden their hearts by telling them how their 
son had profited by the teaching ; how he had 
kept continually repeating to himself by the way 
the portentous words, — ''Save, or be a slave;" 



AX ALABM. 141 

how eacli well-stocked homestead tliat they passed 
had served to remind him only of the thrift of the 
inhabitants ; how he had noted too, in every factory, 
the long course of industry and self-denial that had 
amassed the riches to raise it, as well as the enter- 
prise that had devoted the wealth to such a pur- 
pose ; and how, as some stray beggar that they 
chanced to meet on the road, asked them to " help 
him to a quarter of a dollar," the little fellow 
(when he had given him as much as he could 
spare,) would first want to know whether he was a 
born-beggar or not, and then proceed to lecture the 
vagabond soundly for liking beggary better than 
work, and preferring to remain the lowest slave of 
all, rather than save. 

" Bless the boy !" the mother cried ; " 1'ni glad 
he gave the poor soul something more than 
words, though. But I always told you, Josh — you 
know I did — that you were mistaken in our Ben." 

" Have heed, brother; have heed!" was all the 
father said in reply. "Beware lest you beget in 
the lad a lust for ' treasures that moth and rust 
doth corrupt.' " 

"Never fear, Josiah! I have not done with 
my little godson yet. I know well what I took 
upon myself when I became sponsor for the 
sins of the child ; and do you wait till my worldly 
lessons are ended," the uncle made answer. 

"Not done with the boy yet, Benjamin!" ex- 
claimed the father. " Why, how much longer will 
you keep him away from earning a crust for him- 
self? It's high time he should be out in the 
world, for a lad learns more by a day's practice 
than a whole month's precepts/' 

" Ay, send him to sea on a mere raft of loose 
principles, do" cried Uncle Ben, " do — child as 
he is — without any moral compass to show him 
the cardinal points of the world, or hardly any 



142 YOUNG BENJAMIN FRANKLIN. 

knowledge of the heavens either, by which to 
shape his course : that's the way to insure an easy 
and prosperous voyage for the youngster, certainly 
— that's the way to start a boy in life ;" and the 
uncle laughed ironically at the notion. 

44 But what else do you want to teach the lad, 
Benjamin ?" asked the mother, anxious to prevent 
a discussion at that hour of the night. 

44 What else, Abiah!" echoed the brother-in- 
law. 44 Why, I want to make a man of him ; as 
yet I've taught him to be little better than an ant. 
But do you leave him to me only for another 
week, and a fine right-minded little gentleman he 
shall be, I promise you. Xow look here, both of 
you : I taught the boy first that he must either 
work, beg, or starve." 

44 Good !" nodded Dame Franklin. 

44 Then I taught him how to make his work light 
and pleasant." 

4 ' Good !" repeated the dame. 

4 4 And after that, I taught him how to make the 
produce of his work the means of future ease and 
comfort to him." 

44 Very good!" Dame Franklin ejaculated. 

44 I've shown him, in fact," added Uncle Ben- 
jamin, 44 not only how he must slave in order 
to live, but how, by putting his heart into his 
labour, he may lighten the slavery ; and also, how, 
by continual saving, he may one day put an end 
to all further slaving for the rest of his life." 

" Yes, brother," added the stern old Puritan 
tallow-chandler, " you've taught the boy how to 
become a rich man," and he laid a scornful emphasis 
upon the epithet. 

44 Ay, Josiah, I have," meekly replied . the 
other ; 4 4 and now I want to teach him how to be- 
come a good one. I have the same scorn for mere 
riches and money-grubbing as yourself, brother* — 



AX ALAKM. 143 

a scorn that is surpassed only by my abomination 
of wilful beggary and voluntary serfdom. Is 
there not a medium, Josh, between the overween- 
ing love of wealth, "and the reckless disregard of 
it ; a middle course between a despotic delight in 
that worldly power which comes of riches, and the 
servile abandonment of ourselves to that wretched 
bondage which is necessarily connected with 
poverty ? Surely a man is a dog who loves to be 
fed continually by others ; and there is to my 
mind no higher worldliness that a young man can 
learn than to have faith in his own powers : to 
know that the world's prizes of ease and com- 
petence are open to him, if he will but toil dili- 
gently and heartily, and husband carefully and 
discreetly. To teach a lad to be self-reliant is to 
teach him to have a soul above beggary ; it is to 
make an independent gentleman of him, even while 
he is labouring for his living." 

" But have a care, brother, I say again; have 
a care of worldly pride and worldly lust," inter- 
posed the primitive old father, gravely. " I would 
rather have my son the meek and uncomplaining 
pauper in his old age, than an overbearing purse- 
proud fool ; the one tired of life and sighing for 
the sweet rest of heaven, and the other so wedded 
to the world, and all its pomps and vanities, that 
he wants no other heaven than the gross luxuries 
of the earth." 

" I detest mere worldlyism, Josh, as much as 
you do," returned his brother Benjamin. "But 
because it is base and wicked to be utterly worldly, 
it by no means follows that it is noble and good 
to be utterly zwworldly. To despise the world 
about us, because there is another and a better world 
to come, is as wrong as not to value life, because we 
hope to live hereafter. And as it is our duty to 
promote our health, by conforming our habits to 



144 YOUNG BENJAMIN FRANKLIN. 

the laws of bodily welfare ; so is it our duty to 
conform our pursuits to the laws of worldly hap- 
piness — laws which are as much part of God's 
ordination as the conditions of health, or the suc- 
cession of the seasons themselves. The laws of 
worldly life are written on the tablets of the 
world ; and the handwriting is unmistakably the 
Creator's own. There was no need of any special- 
revelation to make them known to us. If we will 
but open our eyes, we may read them in letters of 
light. And surely they are as much for the guid- 
ance of our worldly lives, as the biblical com- 
mandments are for the regulation of our spiritual 
ones." 

" There is no gainsaying your brother's words, 
Josh," urged the dame, for she was too an- 
xious to get to bed to say a syllable that was likely 
to prolong the argument ; and then, by way of a 
gentle hint as to the hour, the housewife proceeded 
to place the tin candlesticks on the table before 
the two brothers. 

" Well, Ben, the days of monkish folly are past," 
responded Josiah as he rose from his seat; " and 
people no longer believe that true philosophy puts 
up with a tub for a home. There may be as much 
worldly pride too in the austerity of a hermit's 
life, as in the pomp of Solomon ' arrayed in all his 
glory.' Nevertheless, the heart of man is fond 
enough of the world's gewgaws, without needing 
any schooling in the matter." 

" Can that be truly said, Josiah, so long as three- 
fourths of the world remain steeped to the very 
lips in poverty?" Uncle Ben calmly inquired. 
" All men may covet wealth, brother, but that few 
know the way to win even a competence is proven 
by the misery of the great mass of the people. 
I want to see comfort reign throughout the world, 
instead of squalor ; competence, rather than want ; 




Ycrung Ben gives hi: 



5 Sister an account of his Travels.-?. 145. 



THE GREAT RAREE-SHOW, 145 

self-reliance, rather than beggary ; independence, 
rather than serfdom. I wish to teach a man to 
get money, rather than want it, or beg for it : to 
get money with honour and dignity ; to husband 
it with honour and dignity ; and, what is more, 
to spend it with honour and dignity too. And, 
please God, that is the high lesson your boy shall 
learn, before I have done with him.*' 

" Be it so then, brother, be it so ; and may he 
prove the fine honourable and righteous man we 
both desire to see him/' cried the father. 

" Amen!" added the mother; and then with a 
" God bless you," the brothers parted for the 



m 



iffht. 



CHAPTEK XY. 



THE GREAT RAREE-SHOW. 



Young Ben on the morrow was a different lad 
from the tired, drowsy, and taciturn little tra- 
veller of the previous night. For no sooner was 
sister Deborah below-stairs, arranging for the 
morning meal, than he was by her side, following 
her, now to the wood-house, then to the pantry, 
and afterwards to the parlour — with a shoe on one 
of his hands, and a brush in the other, busily 
engaged in the double office of disburdening his 
mind of the heavy load of wonders he had seen on 
his travels, and getting rid at the same time of a 
little of the mud he had brought back with him 
from the country. 

Then, as the girl began to set the basins and 
the platters on the table, he fell to dodging her 
about the room, as she rambled round and round, 
and chattering to her the while of the curious old 
French town of St. Louis, but still polishing away 

L 



146 YOUNG BENJAMIN FRANKLIN. 

as he chattered. And though Deborah insisted 
that he must not clean his shoes over the breakfast- 
table, on he went, scrubbing incessantly, with his 
head on one side, and talking to the girl by jerks, 
first of that darling Jacky, the pony they had 
borrowed of the French farmer, and next of the 
" ark " in which they had descended the great 
Ohio river. 

When too the boy retired with the little maid, 
to assist her in opening the store, there he would 
stand in the street, with one of the shutters in his 
hand resting on the stones, as he described to her 
the herd of buffaloes, and flocks of wild turkeys, 
and the deer and pelicans that he had seen in the 
prairies. Nor would he even cease his prattling 
during the boiling of the milk ; for while Debo- 
rah stood craning over the simmering saucepan, 
the eager lad was close against her shoulder, 
jabbering away, now of the lusciousness of the 
custard-apples, then of the delicacy of 1he prairie- 
plums and grapes, and " only wishing'' she had 
been with uncle and himself at their gipsy- 
dinner off venison-hams and wild fruit in the 
great hunting-plains. 

During breakfast, however, both the manner 
and the matter of the boy's discourse were 
changed; for no sooner did the father and mother 
make their appearance, than the little fellow grew 
graver in tone, and talked only of such things as 
he fancied his parents would be glad to hear from 
him. In his desire, however, to let his father see 
the new man he had become, and what fine 
principles he had acquired by his journey, the 
boy, boy-like, went into such raptures upon the 
art of money-making, and the use of capital in 
the world, that the simple-minded old Puritan 
kept shaking his head mournfully at his brother 



TEE GREAT EAEEE-SHOYw 147 

Ben, as lie listened to the hard, worldly philo- 
sophy — for it sounded even tenfold harder and 
harsher from the lips of the mere child exjDOund- 
ing it. So when the exigencies of the shop' sum- 
moned the candle-maker from the table, Josiah 
could not refrain from whispering in the ear of 
the elder Benjamin, as he passed behind his chair, 
u You have a deal to do and to undo yet, brother 
Ben, before you make a fine man of the lad." 

But once alone with his mother, the little fellow 
was again a different boy ; for then, as he jumped 
into her lap, and hugged the dame (much to the 
discomfiture of her clean mob-cap and tidy muslin 
kerchief), he told how he had made up his mind to 
become a rich man, and how happy he meant to 
make them all by-and-by ; how she was to have a 
" help" to do all the work of the house for her; 
how he meant to buy Deborah a pony (just like 
dear old Jacky) with the first money lie got ; and 
how Uncle Benjamin was to live with them 
always at the nice house they were to have in the 
country, with a prime large orchard to it ; and 
how, too, he was to purchase a ship for Captain 
Holmes (it wouldn't cost such a great deal of 
money, he was sure), so that the captain might 
have a vessel of his own, and take them with him 
sometimes to any part of the world they wanted 
to see. All of which it dearly delighted the 
mother's heart to hear, not because she had the 
least faith in the fond plans of the boy ever being- 
realized, but because his mere wish to see them 
all happy made her love him the more. 

At last it was Uncle Benjamin's turn for a tele- 
a-iete with the little man (for the household 
duties soon called the dame away from the par- 
lour) ; whereupon the godfather proceeded to 
impress upon his pupil the necessity of continuing 
their lessons with as little delay as possible, 

l 2 



148 YOUNG BENJAMIN FRANKLIN. 

telling him that his father had given them only 
another week's grace, and adding that there was 
much still for the little fellow to learn in the time. 

"What! more to be learnt, uncle?" cried the 
astounded youth, who was under the impression 
that he was well enough crammed with worldly 
wisdom to be started in life at once. " Surely 
there can be nothing else for a fellow to know. 
Why, you've taught me how to get on in the 
world, and how to end as a rich man too ; and 
what more a chap can want, I'm sure I can't see." 

" Of course you can't, little Mr. Clear-sighted," 
replied the uncle, as he seized his godson by the 
shoulders, and shook him playfully as he spoke. 
"I've taught you how to get money, lad, but 
that's only the first half of life's lesson : the main 
portion of the problem is how to spend it." 

"Well, that is good!" laughed out young Ben- 
jamin, tickled with the apparent ludicrousness of 
any lessons being needed for such a purpose. 
" Why, every boy in the world knows how to do 
that, without any teaching at all." 

" It comes to him as naturally as a game at 
leap-frog, I suppose," quietly interjected the god- 
father, with a smile. 

" Of course it does," the youngster rejoined. 
li Now you just give me half a dollar, uncle," he 
added, grinning at the impudence of his own 
argument ; " and I'll soon let you see that / know 
how to spend it." 

" Soh ! you'd spend it directly you got it, 
would you ; eh, you young rogue ? Is that all the 
good that is to come of our long journey to the 
prairies ?" ejaculated the godfather, as he cuffed 
the lad, first on one side of his head, and then on the 
other, as sportively and gently as a kitten does a 
ball. 

" Oh, no — no to be sure, uncle," stammered out 



THE GREAT RAREE-SHOW. 149 

the abashed youngster; " that is, I meant to say, 
I — I should put it by and save it, of course." 

" What, hoard it, eh ?" drily observed the other, 
as he eyed the lad over the top of his spectacles, 
that were almost as big as watch-glasses. 

" No, no. I didn't mean that either. You're so 
sharp at taking a chap up. I meant to say " (and 
the boy, to set himself right, shook himself almost 
as violently as a Newfoundland dog just out of 
the water), " I — I should put the money in the 
savings-bank, and let it grow and grow there at 
interest ; just as you said the corn does, you 
know, uncle." 

" Well, what then, lad?" asked the old man. 

66 Why then I should keep on putting more to 
it as fast as I got it, and let it all go on increasing 
together," was the ready answer. 

" Well, and what then r" again inquired Uncle 
Benjamin. 

" Why, when I'd saved up enough, I should 
use it as capital to start me in some business, and 
so make it the means of getting me more money," 
responded the youth, who was now able to recall 
the previous lesson. 

" Well, and what then?" the old man demanded 
once more. 

" Why then — then — oh, then, I should get 
more money still, to be sure. But what makes 
you keep on saying ' Well, and what then ?' in 
such a tantalizing way as you do, uncle ?" added 
the pupil, growing impatient under the continued 
questioning. 

" Yes : and when your capital had yielded you 
4 more money still,' as you say, what then, lad ?" 
persisted the catechist. 

" Why then I should give up business alto- 
gether — and — and enjoy myself ! Yes, that's what 
I should do, I can tell you," was the candid reply. 



150 YGUXG BEWASffif FKANKLIX 

"Ay, "boy! enjoy yourself!" eclioecl the elder 
Benjamin, with a sarcastic toss of the head ; 
4 ' enjoy yourself ! that is to say, you'd proceed to 
spend the wealth that it had cost you the labour 
of a life to accumulate. Or maybe, you'd spend 
only the interest of your money, though that is 
almost the same thing ; for the interest duly hus- 
banded would make your stock-in- hand grow even 
greater still." 

"Well, there's no harm in a fellow enjoying 
himself after he's done his work, is there ?" the 
"bewildered youth demanded, in a half-surly tone. 

" True, Ben, there is no harm in enjoyment that 
brings no harm with it, either to ourselves or 
others," responded the Mentor. " But you see, 
my little man," he went on, " the end of the argu- 
ment is the same as the beginning ; the last ques- 
tion is but a repetition of the first — ' When you've 
got your money, what will you do with it ?' Spend 
it, you say ; and spend it you, or some one else, 
assuredly will in the long run. Such is but the 
natural result of all money- getting. We begin 
with saving, and finish at the very point which 
we avoid at starting — only that we may have more 
money ultimately to spend. Still, therefore, the 
query is, how will you spend your money when 
you've got it? In what manner will you enjoy 
yourself, as you call it ?" 

The boy stared in his uncle's face as much as to 
say, whatever is he driving at. 

However,the old man paid no heed to the wonder- 
ment of the lad, but proceeded as follows. " The 
means of enjoyment, my son, are infinite in the 
world ; some of these are purchasable, and otherr; 
not to be had for money. Creature- comforts and 
articles of luxury, for instance, may be bought ; but 
these are among the lowest and most transient of 
human pleasures ; whereas, love, the purest and 



THE CHEAT RAREE-SHOW. 151 

most lasting of all earthly happiness, is beyond all 
price. We can no more bargain for that than we can 
for the sunshine which is sent down from heaven 
to gladden alike the poorest and the richest of man- 
kind. In evertheless, none but an ascetic will deny 
that money is one of the great means of pleasure 
in this life ; and if the end of money-getting be to 
obtain an extra amount of enjoyment in the world, 
surely we cannot market well, and get a good 
pennyworth for our penny, unless we know some- 
thing about the different qualities of the article 
we are going to purchase. If we cannot distin- 
guish between what is really good and what is 
comparatively worthless, how shall we prevent 
being cheated ? And if we do get cheated of our 
prize in the end, after all our toil and trouble, ail 
our stinting and saving, why then the labour of a 
whole life is wasted." 

" But, uncle/' young Benjamin interjected, 
" surely everybody knows what is pleasure to them 
without any teaching at all.'' 

' £ They do, Ben — instinctively; but what they 
do not know is, what they have never given per- 
haps a moment's thought to : namely, the different 
forms of pleasure of which their natures are sus- 
ceptible. In their greed to have their fill of the 
iirst gratification that has tickled them, they have 
never paused to weigh one form of enjoyment with 
another— never stayed to learn which yields the 
purest delight for the least cost, or which has the 
smallest amount of evil, or the greatest amount of 
good connected with it. What is pleasant to one 
person, is often foolish, or even hateful, to another : 
and it is so simply because the sources of happiness 
appear different, not only to different minds, but 
even to the same mind at different periods of life. 
What the child likes, the gray -beard despises : 
what the fool prizes, the sage scorns. You will 



152 YOUNG BEXJAMIX FRANKLIN. 

understand by-and-by, rny boy, that the art of 
spending money wisely is even more difficult than 
the art of getting it honourably." 

u I think I can see a little bit of what you mean, 
uncle," added the youngster ; and then, after a 
slight pause, he asked, " But how are you going 
to impress the lesson, as you call it, upon me this 
time — eh, unky ?" he inquired in a coaxing tone, 
for he was satisfied his godfather had some new 
sight in store for him, by way of enforcing the 
precept. 

" I am going to show you this time, Ben, a 
curious collection of animals. I purpose taking 
you through our great Museum of Natural His- 
tory," said the old man. 

"Oh, thank you, dear unky ! thank you!" ex- 
claimed the delighted pupil, as he rose and curled 
his arm about his uncle's neck. "Are we to set 
off to-day? I'm so fond of seeing animals, you 
don't know. Shall we see any monkeys, unky, 
eh?" 

" Ay, scores, boy ! scores ! bears and sloths too ; 
wild asses and laughing hyenas ; mocking-birds 
and gulls ; butcher-birds and scavenger-birds as 
well," Uncle Benjamin made answer, with a sly 
smile twitching at the corners of his mouth. 

The boy chafed his hands together in anticipa- 
tion of the treat, as he cried, " Oh, won't it be 
jolly— that's all !" 

"But, Ben, the animals I shall show you are 
not preserved in glass cases," the old man added. 

"Ah, that's right! I can't bear those stupid 
stuffed things. I like them to be all alive and 
roaring, I do," was the simple rejoinder. 

"Nor are they confined in cages, with learned 
names, descriptive of the order and family they 
belong to, stuck up over their dens. No naturalist 
as yet has classified them ; none given us a cata- 



THE GREAT RAREE-SHOW. 153 

logue of their habits, or of the localities they 
infest ;" and as the godfather concluded the speech, 
the hoy looked at him so steadfastly in the face, 
that the old man was unable to keep from laughing 
any longer. 

4i Come, come now!" cried the lad; "you're 
having a bit of fun with me, sir ; that you are. I 
shouldn't wonder but that they are no animals 
after all." 

" Animals they assuredly are, Ben," responded 
the uncle ; " but tame ones, and to be seen almost 
every day, in that strangest of all menageries : 
human society." 

'•' Oh ! then they're nothing but men, I suppose. 
What a shame of you now, unky, to make game of a 
chap in such a way !" was all that the disappointed 
lad could murmur out, as he drew his arm, half in 
dudgeon, from round the old man's neck. 

" Well, lad," the other remonstrated, ;i the men 
I wish to show you are as much natural curiosities 
in their way, as any animals ever seen at a fair. 
And as you can find delight in gazing at a monkey 
cage, and watching the tricks and antics of crea- 
tures that bear an ugly resemblance to yourself; 
so, among the strange human animals that I shall 
take you to see, you may observe the counterpart 
of your own character, portrayed as in a distort- 
ing glass ; and behold, in the freaks and follies of 
each, the very mimicry of your own nature, with 
your own destiny, if you will, aped before your 
eyes." 



154 YOUXG BEXJAMDT FF.AXKLIX. 



CHAPTER XVI. 

PLEASURE HUNTING. 

The couple were not long starting on their curious 
errand. 

Little Ben was perhaps even more bewildered 
than he had ever been. What could his uncle 
want to show him a lot of queer, strange men for ? 
and what could they possibly have to do with 
teaching him how to spend his money ? 

Still there was some novelty to be seen, and the 
sight involved an excursion somewhere ; so there 
was stimulus enough to make the boy anything 
but an unwilling party to the expedition. 

The uncle, on the other hand, was busy with 
very different thoughts as the two trotted through 
the streets of the town- He had so much to show 
the little man, and in so short a time too, that he 
was at a loss how to shape the heterogeneous mass 
of curiosities into anything like method. 

First the old gentleman would turn down one 
street, then stop suddenly in the middle of it, 
and after gnawing at his thumb-nail, with his head 
on one side like a cat at a fish-bone, dart off, quite 
as suddenly, in a diametrically opposite direction. 
Next he thought it would be better to begin this 
way ; " and yet no !" — he would say to himself, as 
he halted a second time, and stared for a minute 
or two intently at the paving-stones — " that way 
we shall have to go over the same ground twice ;" 
so he decided he would take the lad first to see that 
old — and yet, " stay again '!" said he, " we ought by 



PLEASURE HUNTING. 155 

rights to see that one last of all.*' And accordingly 
the route was altered once more, and little Ben 
had to wheel round after his uncle for the fourth 
or fifth time, and make straight away for some 
other quarter of the city. 

Then, as the old man kept hurrying along, 
sucking the handle of his cane in his abstraction, 
and indulging in a rapid succession of steps as short 
and quick as a waiter's, he was continually talking 
to himself, muttering either, u Let me see ! let me 
see ! where does that queer old fellow live now ?' 
or saying to himself, u Didn't somebody or other 
tell me that Adam Tonks had left the cellar he 
used to rent in Back Street?*' or else he was 
mentally inquiring in what quarter of the town it 
was he had met with some other odd character 
some time back ? 

At length, however. Uncle Benjamin had made 
up his mind to introduce the boy to the curiosities 
of his acquaintance just as they fell in their way, 
and trust to circumstances, as they went the 
rounds of the town, either to recall or present to 
them such peculiarities as he wished to bring 
under the observation of his little pupil. 

" Now remember, Ben !" he said, in a half-whis- 
per as he stood on the door-step of the first house he 
was about to visit, with the latch in his hand. 
44 Bemember, I am not going to show you any 
human monstrosities, nor any of the more extrava- 
gant freaks of nature among mankind, but merely 
to let you see some of the broadly-marked dif- 
ferences of character in men ; to show you, indeed, 
in how many diverse ways human beings can spend 
their money — or, what is the same thing, their time ; 
to point out to you what different notions of plea- 
sure there are among the tribe of so-called rational 
creatures, and how, though all the big babies in the 
world are running after the same butterfly, thev 



156 YOUNG BENJAMIN FRANKLIN. 

pursue it like a knot of schoolboys, dodging it in a 
hundred different ways, and each believing, as he 
clutches at the bright-coloured little bit of life, 
that he has got it safe within his grasp." 

Kattonal Animal. — No. 1. 

" Give me joy, Master Franklin !" cried a little 
bald-headed man, who was busy at a table, as the 
couple entered the room, unpacking the contents 
of what seemed to be an enormous green sand- 
wich-box, filled with grass and weeds. Indeed, 
so busy was the host with the green stuff spread 
before him, that he no sooner withdrew his palm 
from the grasp of the uncle, than he set to work 
again examining minutely the little wild flower 
he held in the other hand. " Give me joy, I say ! 
I have discovered the only specimen of the poten- 
tilla, or common silver-weed, that has yet been 
found in the New World. There it is, sir;" and 
the old man held it tenderly between his finger 
and thumb, as he eyed it with increased pride: 
"and a? — I — lovely specimen it is, I can assure 
you. Now you wouldn't believe it, perhaps, but 
I wouldn't take a thousand guineas for that — 
mere weed as it is. Only think of that, my little 
chap — a thousand guineas ;" and he laid his hand 
upon 3^oung Benjamin's head as he spoke. "A 
good deal of money that, isn't it, my little man ? 
But I've been hunting after that same weed for 
years — many years, my dear boy — and travelled, I 
dare say, thousands of miles in search of it. I knew 
it must exist in North America somewhere ; and 
I was deetermined to go down to posterity as the 
discoverer of it," and the little ferrety man beat 
the air with his fist as he said the words. " So 
you see what patience and perseverance will do, 
my good lad. 



PLEASURE HUNTING. 157 

"What are you going to be, eh?" he inquired. 
" Ha! they should make a botanist of a fine little 
fellow like you, with a head like yours. Xo 
pursuit like that in the world ; the greatest plea- 
sure in life ; hunting after the wild flowers and 
plants ; always out in the open air, either up on 
the hills or down in the valleys, or wandering by 
the brook-side, or along the beautiful lanes, or 
else buried in the woods. You'd have to go fine 
long walks into the country then, my little man ; 
but you like walking, I suppose. Bless you, I'm 
out for weeks at a time, and think myself well 
repaid for all my trouble if I can only bring 
home a rare specimen or two. Look here, little 
what's-your-name," he went on, talking so fast 
to the boy that the words came tumbling one 
over the other out of his mouth ; "here is a little 
bit of my handiwork." And the botanist slid from 
the top of an old bureau near him a large folio 
volume, consisting of sheets of cartridge paper 
bound together, and then spreading it open at 
one side of the table, he showed the lad that 
there was a dried and flattened plant stuck upon 
every page. " There" he cried, exultingly, with 
such an emphasis upon the word that it sounded 
like a deep sigh, " look at that, my man ! but it 
hasn't a twentieth part of the plants I've collected 
in my time ; though where's the wonder ? I've 
been at it all my life ; ever since I was a boy of 
your age, and walked thousands and thousands of 
miles ; ay, and spent hundreds upon hundreds of 
guineas to complete my collection. There, my 
fine fellow, that's the Campanula sylvestris" he con- 
tinued, chattering as he turned over the pages be- 
fore the boy; " that's the Crambe maritima, or 
common sea-colewort, and a very fine specimen 
too." And so he kept gabbling on until Uncle 
Benjamin thanked the old gentleman for his kind- 



158 YOUNG BENJAMIN" FRANKLIN. 

ness to the lad, and said they would not intrude 
on his time any longer. 

Eational Animal. — No. 2. 

" What, Adam J in the old state, eh ?" cried Uncle 
Benjamin, as he and his nephew descended the 
steps of a dark cellar in one of the back streets 
of Boston, and found a man there asleep as he sat, 
with his unkempt head resting on his elbow, at 
the edge of a small deal table, and with a piece of 
salt fish lying, untouched, on a broken plate by 
his side. 

The uncle had to shake the sleeper violently 
to rouse him ; whereupon the man stared, with his 
bloodshot eyes, vacantly at his visitor for a time : 
and then with a scowl flung his head back upon 
his arm, as he growled out, " Well, and if I am 
in the same state, what's that to you ? You don't 
pay for the jacky, do you ? Besides, you like 
what I hate — psalm-singing ; and I like what you 
hate — a drop of good stuff — like they sell at ' The 
Pear-Tree ' round the corner. Dum vivimus vivamus 
is my motto, and you don't know what that 
means, Master Franklin, for a pot now. Come, I 
say, mate, are you game to stand a quartern for 
a fellow this morning — yuck ?" and as the man 
said the words he raised his head again ; and then 
little Benjamin (for the boy's eyes had got used 
to the dusk of the place by this time) could see 
that the drunkard's clothes hung in tatters all 
about him ; while his dark, unshaven beard con- 
trasted with his blanched face, as strongly as the 
black muzzle of a bull-dog. 

" I ask your pardon, Master Franklin, for mak- 
ing so free," the sot added, in a wheedling tone ; 
" but, you see, I had a little drop too much last 
night," the man wen: on, "and I sha'n't be quite 



PLEASURE HUNTING. 159 

right till I get just a thimbleful or bo of the neat 
article inside of me." 

" I'd as lief pay for a quartern of poison for 
you. Adam," said Uncle Benjamin, mournfully. 

"You would, would you!" roared the other, 
springing up like a wild beast from his lair, and 
clutching the broken back of the chair on which 
he had been sitting ; and he was preparing to 
strike his visitor down with it, but he stas^ered 
back lumpishly against the wall. 

The boy new to his uncle's side, and whispered, 
" Oh, come away, pray do, uncle ! I have seen 
enough here!" 

The uncle, however, swept past the youth, and 
going towards the dram-drinker, said kindly, 
fct Adam ! Adam ! think of the man you once were." 

The drunkard's head dropped upon his bosom, 
and the next minute he fell to whining and weep- 
ing like a child. Presently he hiccuped cut 
through his sobs, "I do think of it, — yuck t-— 
and then I want drink to drown the cursed 
thoughts. Come now, old friend," and he vainly 
tried to lay his hand on Uncle Benjamin's 
shoulder, " send the youngster there, for just a 
noggin — only one now — from ' The Pear-Tree,' 
and then I shall be all right again." 

The friend shook his head as he replied, 
" You won't, Adam ; you'll be all wrong again — as 
wrong as ever, man. Isn't it this drink that has 
beggared you, and despoiled you of your fortune, 
and of every friend, too — but myself? and yet 
you are so mad for it still, that you crave for 
more." 

'" I do ! 1 do thirst for it; my tongue's like a 
bit of red-hot iron in my mouth now with the 
parching heat that's on me. I tell you it's the 
only thing that can put an end to care, and (sing- 
ing) drown it in the bo-wo-wole. 



160 YOUNG BENJAMIN FRANKLIN, 

" Chorus — We'll drown it — yuck ! — in the bo- 
wo-wole. Ha! you should have seen Adam 
lasht night. Blessh you, I was as jolly as a shand- 
boy — the d'light of the whole tap room. I 
tipped 'em some of my best songs — vain songs as 
you call 'em ; and you know I always could sing a 
good song if I liked, Master Franklin. Come, 
I'll give you a stave now if you'll only send— 
yuck ! — for that little drop of jacky. The young- 
ster here, I dare say, would like to hear me — 
wouldn't you, my dear ?" (but as there was no 
answer, he added,) " What ! you won't send for the 
gin ? Well then, leave it alone — you stingy old 
psalm-singing humbug: I wouldn't be beholden 
to you for it now, if you were to press it on me. 
But never mind ! never mind ! never mind ! May 
— may — what the deuce is that shentiment ?" (and 
he rubbed his hair round and round till it was 
like a mop ;) " tut ! tut ! and it's such a favourite 
shentiment of mine too after a song. Well, all I 
know is, it's something about, may something 
or other — yuck ! — never shorten friendship. But 
never mind ! never mind ! Lawyer Muspratt is 
going to sell that little reversion I'm entitled to 
on my maiden aunt's death ; it's the only thing 
I've got left now — but never mind ! never mind !■ 
and then won't Adam Tonks and the boys at ' The 
Pear-Tree ' have a night of it ! Yes, ' durn vivimus 
vivamus ' is my motto, — yuck — if I die for it." 

The man was silent for a minute or two, and 
then he said, as if waking up from a dream, 

" 1 wonder who ever it was saw me down the 
cellar steps last night. But never mind ! never 
mind ! who's afraid ? — not Adam Tonks, not he. 
Come, friend Franklin — for you have been a right 
good friend to me often, that you have, old cock — 
if you won't send for that drop of jaek}^ oat of your 
own pocket, will you lend me half a dollar to get 



PLEASUKE HUNTING. 161 

it myself — yiick ? I'll give it yon back again when 
the reversion's shold. Oh, honour bright ! — yuck I 
— -honour bright, friend !" 

" If it was for food, Adam, yon should have it, 
and welcome," was the plain answer. 

"Food be cursed !" shouted the madman, again 
roused to a fury ; "there's that bit of stinking salt 
fish I've had for the last week as a relish, just to 
pick a bit ; there you can carry it home with you 
— you can, you methodistical old hunks ; take it 
with you ;" and with a violent effort, the man 
flung the piece of dried haddock towards Uncle 
Benjamin ; but so wide of the mark, and with 
such a sweep of the arm, that it struck the wall 
against which the drunkard himself kept swaying. 

Whereupon the godfather, in obedience to the 
boy's repeated entreaty, took his departure. 

Rational Animal. — No. 3. 

' The couple were soon in one of the most 
fashionable streets of the town ; and in another 
minute little Ben stood in the middle of a grand 
saloon, wheeling round and round as he gazed 
with uplifted eyes, first at the huge mirrors, reach- 
ing from the ceiling to the floor, then at the 
pictures that covered the other parts of the walls, 
and then taken with the marble busts and figures 
that were ranged in different corners of the room. 
" The chairs are all gold and satin, I declare ; and 
the tables and cabinets of different-coloured 
woods, worked into the most beautiful patterns ; 
and the chandeliers too just like clusters of jewels," 
thought the astonished lad to himself. 

" Who are we going to see here, uncle ?" he 
said, in a whisper to the old man, as he twitched 
his uncle timidly by the skirt. 

Presently the door of an anteroom was flung 

1M 



162 YOUNG BENJAMIN FRANKLIN. 

open, and a voice drawled out, " Keni in, Franklin,, 
kem in ; I don't mind you. I've only got my 
knight of the goose and kebbage here ; and you 
would hardly I believe the trouble I have with 
these varlets : half my time is taken up with them,. 
I give you my wad, Franklin ; and that merely to 
prevent them turning me out aw — aw — perfect 
skeyarecrow. A man of your fine kimmon sense 
knows as well as anybody, Franklin, that appear- 
ance is everything to a man who — aw — aw, the 
wald is keyind enough to regeyard as aw — aw — 
an arbiter elegeyantiarum, I believe I may say, 
Franklin, eh ? for, thank the powers, the coarsest- 
minded inimy I have in the wald couldn't say that 
Tarn Skeffington isn't, and always has been, the 
best drest man in all Boston. I know well enough, 
Franklin, that with persons of your persuasion (by- 
the-by, can I offer you a kip of chocolate, or a 
gless of tokay ? oh, don't say No), with persons of 
your persuasion dress is utterly ignored — ut-ttarly. 
But, deah me ! with a man in my station — looked 
up to as I said befar, as being something like aw — 
aw — an arbiter elegeyantiarum in matters of the 
tilette— only think now, the kimmotion there'd be 
among the superiah clesses of this city, if Tarn 
Skeffington was -to make his appearance in the 
streets — you'll pardon me, friend Franklin, I 
know you will — in a coat like your own for ex- 
emple !" and the arbiter elegantiarum was so 
tickled with the mere straw of the joke, that he 
dabbed the patches on his face with a handker- 
chief, that was like a handful of foam, as he 
tittered behind it as softly as summer waves 
ripple over the sands. 

Presently he gasped out, between the intervals 
of his simpering, "By-the-by, now, Franklin, da 
permit me, there's a good fellow, just to behold 
myself for one minute in that duffle dressing-gown 



PLEASURE HUXTIXG. 168 

you've kem out in to-day, and to see how you'd 
look in this new plum-coloured piece of magnifi- 
cence of mine. I'm sure you'll obleege me, 
Franklin, for I give you my wad the double sight 
would throw me into an ecstasy of reptchah." 

The motive of Uncle Benjamin for bringing his 
godson to the house was too strong to make him 
object to an exchange of costume that, under any 
other circumstances, he would assuredly have 
refused ; so, to the intense delight of the fine 
gentleman, and even the attendant tailor, the old 
Puritan proceeded to disrobe himself of his own 
coat of humble gray, and to encase his body in the 
gaudy velvet apparel of the beau. 

And when the temporary exchange of garments 
had been duly effected, and the elegant Mr. Tarn 
Skeffington beheld himself in the cheval glass 
attired in the quaint garb of the Puritan, and 
old Benjamin Franklin tricked out in the florid 
costume of the exquisite, the sight was more than 
the delicate nerves of the dandy could bear ; for 
he had to retire to the sofa, and bury his head for 
a while in the squab, or he assuredly would have 
laughed outright. 

The tailor, however, who believed he had never 
seen anything half so comic in the whole of his 
life, chuckled as loud and heartily as a child at 
a pantomime ; nor could he stop himself till his 
more refined customer had demanded " how he 
dairh'd to laff in his presence ;" and even then, 
poor man ! each time he happened to turn round 
and get another peep at the Puritan in the plum- 
coloured suit, the laughter would burst out at the 
corners of his mouth, with the same noise as the 
froth gushing from beneath the cork of an over- 
excited bottle of ginger-beer. 

Neither could little Benjamin himself refrain 
from joining in the mirth at first, though in a 

m2 



164 YOUNG BENJAMIN FRANKLIN. 

little while the smiles of the lad subsided into 
frowns, as the sense that his uncle was "being 
made fun of" came across his mind. 

In a few minutes the arbiter elegantiarum was 
sufficiently himself to rise from the sofa. " I give 
my wad, Franklin," he said as he twisted the old 
gentleman round by the shoulders, " you'd punish 
a few of the geyirls at a dannse at the State House 
in a coat like that — you would, even at your 
time of' life, I give you my wad (Do you snuff, 
Franklin —it's the finest Irish bleggeyard, I assure 
you) ; and I mean to play the same havoc with 
the poor things, I can tell you," he went on as the 
tailor helped them one after the other to ex- 
change coats once more; " for if they can with- 
stand Tarn Skeffington in that plum-coloured piece 
of magnificence, why then they've hearts as im- 
penetrable as sandbags; and heaven knows I 
don't find that the case with the deah creachyos 
generally : for I'm sure they're good and keyind 
to me, Master Franklin, they are indeed, I give 
you my wad ; though they know, I believe, my 
greatest pleasure is to afford them one moment's 
happiness, and there isn't a lovely woman in the 
wald that Tarn Skeffington is not ready to lay down 
his life for — his life, Franklin. I'm sure only last 
year it cost me a fortune in trinkets and essences 
and bouquets for the sweet creachyos. But then 
you know, Franklin, a man in my position— a man 
who is allowed to be — hf both sexes I believe I 
may say — a person of some little taste, and, thank 
the powers, of some little refinement too — a man 
like myself, I say, keyant spend his money on tei - 
rumpery ; that, you see, is the penalty one has to 
pay for being an aw — aw — arbiter elegeyantiarum, as 
I said befar. And yet, after all, surely such a title is 
the proudest that can be bestowed upon a gentle- 
man ; surely it's something to have lived for, 



PLEASURE HUNTING. 1G5 

Franklin, eh? to have gained that much — to be 
the admired of all admirers, as Hamlet has it. 
For who would not rather be the potentate of 
fashion and haut ton — the supreme authority in all 
matters of good taste and elegance — the dictatah 
of superiah mannahs and etiquette — than even be 
like this same famous Petah the Great that every- 
body is talking about now — the monarch of a 
million savages ? But perhaps your little boy 
here," he added, with the faintest indication of a 
bow to young Benjamin, "would like to see the 
pictyahs and statues, and objects of vertu and 
knick-knacks in the next room." 

And then, as the arbiter elegantiarum opened 
the door for them, he continued, "You'll find, I 
believe, some rather ch'ice works of art among 
them — at least the wald tells me so — and heaven 
knows I"ve nearly ruined myself in forming the 
kellection." 

Then, still holding the door for the couple to 
pass through, he bowed profoundly as they made 
their exit, the dandy saying the while, "Your 
obeejent humble servant. Master Franklin, your 
humble servant to kemmand." 



Eatioxal Animal.— No. 4. 

" TV ho's there ? who's there. I say ?" shouted an 
old man. 

" Who-o-o-s there ? who-o-os there, I say ?" was 
screamed out, in the shrill treble of senility and 
fright, from behind the garret-door at which Uncle 
Benjamin and his little companion were presently 
knocking. 

" Come Jerry ! Jerry ! we're no robbers, man 
alive ; it's Benjamin Franklin, of the Hanover 
Street Conventicle, come to see you !" shouted the 



166 YOUNG BENJAMIN FRANKLIN. 

■uncle through the chink of the door, as he rattled 
impatiently at the latch. 

There was a sound of jingling metal and a 
hurried shuffling within the room, accompanied 
with a cry of " I'll open the door directly, friend 
Franklin — I'll open it directly," said the speaker, 
with a sniggle of affected delight. 

" The old fellow's scrambling together his money 
to hide it before we go in," whispered the god- 
father in the ear of the lad. 

In a minute or two they could hear the gaffer 
gasping away as he endeavoured to remove the 
heavy bar from behind the door, and saying the 
while, in the same forced giggling tone as before, 
4C Dear heart! dear heart! I quite forgot the door 
was barred to be sure." 

Once within the room, little Ben found the 
miser's garret even more squalid and poverty- 
stricken than the drunkard's cellar. The broken 
window-panes were stuffed with bundles of dirty 
rags, and the principal light, that entered the little 
dog-hole of a home, dribbled in through the cold 
blue gaps in the roof. The plaster had fallen in 
large patches from the walls, and left huge 
ulcerous-looking blotches there ; while the flooring 
in places was green and brown as rusty copper 
from the soddening of long-continued leakage 
through the tiles. 

In one corner of the apartment there was a 
hillock of mouldy crusts, spotted with white hairy 
tufts of mildew ; in another, a litter of half-putrid 
bones, mingled with pieces of old ochre-stained iron 
and nails; and along one side of the room was ranged 
the mere skeleton of a bedstead, covered with a 
sack stuffed with straw by way of mattress, and 
one solitary blanket that was as thin, and almost 
as black, as coffin-cloth. The only chair was like 
an old bass fish-basket in its rushy raggedness ; 



PLEASURE HUXTIXG. 167 

and a huge sea-chest stood in the middle of the 
room, to do duty for a table ; while the whole place 
reeked with the same damp, musty, fungusy odour 
as a ruin. 

The old miser himself was as spare and trem- 
ulous as a mendicant Lascar, and he had the same 
wretched, craven, crouching, grinning, nipped-up 
air with him too. His black and restless little 
eyes, with their shaggy, overhanging brows, gave 
him the sharp irritable expression of a terrier, and 
there was a continual nervousness in his manner, 
like one haunted by a spectre. He wore a long 
duffle coat that had once been gray, but was now 
almost as motley as a patchwork counterpane, 
from the many- coloured pieces with which it ,had 
been mended ; and on either cuff of this there was 
stuck row after row of pins — that he picked up in 
his rounds — as close as the wires to a sieve. 

As the uncle and nephew entered the apartment, 
the miser retreated hurriedly from the doorway ; 
and then scrambling towards the bedstead, seated 
himself on the edge of it, with his arms stretched 
out, so as to prevent either of his visitors coming 
there. 

" Well, you see, Master Jerry, I've brought a 
fagot of firewood with me this time," said the 
elder Benjamin, as he telegraphed to his nephew 
to deposit the bundle of sticks he had been carry- 
ing down by the fireplace. * I'm not going to sit 
shivering again in your draughty room, with the 
roof and the windows all leaking rheumatisms, 
catarrhs, and agues, as they do, without a handful 
of fire in the grate, I can tell you." And so say- 
ing, he proceeded at once to turn up the collar of 
his coat, and to pantomime to his nephew to undo 
the fagot, and get a fire lighted as quickly as 
possible. 

The little fellow, however, was too much taken 



168 YOUNG BENJAMIN FKANKLIN. 

up with the strangeness of the place, and the 
quaint figure and odd ways of the queer old 
man seated on the bedstead before him, to make 
much haste about the matter; so as he knelt 
down to do his uncle's bidding, he kept fumbling 
at the withy band round the fagot, with his eyes 
now riveted upon the miser, and now fastened 
on the mounds of refuse stored in the different 
corners of the wretched-looking chamber. 

" How you can manage to live in such a place 
as this, Jerry, is more than I can make out," con- 
tinued Uncle Benjamin. 

" Well, you know, Master Franklin." responded 
the old hunks, in a whining tone, and grinning 
sycophantically as he spoke, " rents are uncommon 
dear, and I can't afford to pay any more than I 
do here. A quarter of a dollar a week for a mere 
place to put one's old head in is a great deal of 
money, ain't it now ?" 

" Can't afford, man alive ! why, you could afford 
to rent a mansion if you pleased," was the scorn- 
ful reply. 

" How you do talk, friend Franklin, to be sure ! 
You always seem to think I'm made of money, 
that you do," returned the miser, with a faint 
chuckle, as he pretended to treat the notion of his 
wealth as a mere joke. " Hah ! if I'd only listened 
to such as you, I should have been in the poor- 
house long before this — he ! he ! he !" he added, 
with another titter. 

" And if you had been, Jerry, you would have 
been both better housed and fed there than you 
are here," the elder Benjamin made answer. 

" Ye-e-es ! I dare say I should ; a great deal, and 
for nothing too," grinned the old man, as he 
gloated for a moment over the idea of the gratui- 
tous board and lodging; the next minute, how- 
ever, he added, with a sorrowful shake of the 



PLEASURE HUNTING. 169 

head, "But they wouldn't adroit me into the poor 
house, you see, because they know I've always 
had the fear of dying of hunger in my old age 
before rny eyes, and managed to save up just a 
dollar or two against it. IS o ! no ! it is only the 
prodigals and the unthrifts they'll consent to 
keep there for nothing ; and a pretty lesson iliat 
is to preach to the world, ain't it now, Master 
Franklin ?" 

" Well, but Jerry, Jerry," expostulated Uncle 
Benjamin, anxious to bring the miser to some- 
thing like common sense ; " what on earth is the 
use of your having saved up this dollar or two, as 
you call it, against that eternal bugbear of yours 
— ' dying of hunger in your old age,' if you con- 
tinue to starve yourself, as you are doing now, day 
after day ?" 

"Ha! ha! ha!" laughed Master Jerry in re- 
turn, and with as little unction in the laughter as 
though he had been a hyena rather than a man : 
"and you'd have me spend all my hard-earned 
savings in eating and drinking, I suppose. Ha ! 
ha ! and a deal the better I should be for that, 
when my money was all gone, and I left without 
a penny in my old age ! No, no ! friend Frank- 
lin ; so long as I've got a dollar or two by me, I 
know no harm can come to me ;" and the gaffer 
chafed his weazened hands together, as he chuckled 
over his fancied security. 

" Madman !" muttered the elder Benjamin, 
aside ; " and yet you suffer, continually in the 
present, the very haim you dread in the future." 

"Do you know, friend Franklin," the miser 
went on, " what is the only delight I have left in 
the world now (I don't mind telling you as 
much, for you won't let any one know I've got 
a few dollars by me here, will you) ? why it's to 
sit and look at the few pieces I've managed to 



170 YOUNG BENJAMIN FRANKLIN. 

•save — though they are but a very few, I give you 
my word — for it's only when I've got them 
spread out before my eyes, and keep biting 'em 
-one after another between my old teeth, to con- 
vince myself that there ain't a bad coin among 
'em, that I feel in any way sure that I sha'n't die 
a beggar after all. Ye-e-es, friend Franklin, that's 
the only happiness I have in life, now ; but you 
won't tell anybody that I let you know I'd got a few 
dollars by me here, will you now ?" the miser added, 
abruptly, in a'carneyfng tone, as a misgiving stole 
over him concerning the imprudence of the con- 
fession he had made. " Oh, ye-e-es, friend 
Franklin, I'm sure I can trust to you, and" — 
said he, with a cunning whisper, as he pointed 
towards little Ben — " and the boy yonder, too, eh 
—eh?" 

The latter part of the speech drew Uncle Benja- 
min's attention once more to his nephew, and the 
progress he was mating with the fire ; so he 
called out, as a cold shudder crept over his frame, 
" Come, I say, Master Ben ! look alive and get the 
logs lighted " (for the boy had been attending 
more to the conversation than the grate) ; u I 
declare there's a draught here almost as strong as 
the blast to a furnace ;" and, so saying, he set to 
work stamping his feet and chafing his palms, 
io stir the blood in them. Then drawing his 
handkerchief from his pocket he proceeded to 
tie it over his ears. 

The quick eye of the miser noticed something 
fall upon the floor, as his visitor pulled his ker- 
chief from the hind part of his coat ; so springing 
from the bedstead, he began groping on the ground 
for the article the other had dropped. 

" Oh ! it's only a piece of string, after all !" the 
old fellow cried, as he rose up on his feet again, 
with a violent effort. " But peijLaps it's of no use 



PLEASURE HUSTIXG. 171 

to yon, friend Franklin," he added, with a true 
beggar's air ; ' ' and if so, I'll just take care of it 
myself, for I' can't hear to see anything wasted : 
besides, it will come in handy for something some 
day." Whereupon, without waiting for the other 
to tell him he was welcome to the twine, the old 
niggard proceeded to wind it into a figure of 8 
on his finger and thumb, and ultimately to thrust 
it into the wallet-like pocket of his coat. 

As the miser sat at the edge of the bed, thus 
engaged for a while, he said, after a slight pause, 
* You haven't run across that minx, my Mary, of 
late — have you, friend Franklin? — the heartless 
hussey, curse her ! " And as he spat out the last 
words from between his teeth, there was a savage 
fury in the tone which it made young Benjamin 
almost shudder to hear. 

* Come, I say ! I say ! remember, the girl is 
your own flesh and blood, man," cried the elder 
Benjamin, reprovingly. 

"I do ; and therefore I say again, curse her ! — 
•curse the jade for ever and ever !" and the bitter- 
hearted old gray -beard ground out his anathemas 
with a double vindictiveness. &i Didn't she go 
away with that fellow she's married to, and leave 
her old father here alone, and almost helpless, 
without a soul in the world to attend upon him, 
or do a thing for him in his eleventh hour — no, 
not unless they're well paid for it, they won't — 
the mercenary wretches ! I told her to choose 
between me and the beggar she took up with, and 
she preferred the beggar to her old father ; so she 
may starve and rot with the beggar for what I 
•care, for not so much as one stiver of mine does 
she or hers ever touch ! Ko," he added, with all 
the intensity of a miser's lust and uncharitable- 
mess, " not if I have my money soldered down in 
my coffin, and take it into my grave with me," 



172 YOUNG BENJAMIN FKANKLIN. 

said he, as lie ground his fangs and clenched his 
bony fists. 

This was more than Uncle Benjamin could 
bear ; so, starting from his seat, he turned sharply 
round upon the old hunks, as he cried in the fury 
of his indignation, " Your grave, man! Do you 
think you can take your beastly gold and silver 
to hell with you?" adding, half aside, "for they 
won't have it in heaven, I can tell you." 

" Well, well, T dare say not," answered the 
miser, as he shook his head backwards and for- 
wards, and half cried over the ugliness of the 
reproof; "though what's to become of it all, and 
who's to get it and squander it, after the trouble 
I've had to save it, costs me many an anxious 
thought ; so sometimes I think that it will be 
better in the end, perhaps, to have it buried along 
with me, and so have done with it altogether. 
Still, come what may, Mary shall never finger so 
much as a copper-piece of mine, I'll take care." 

There was a pause in the conversation for a 
minute or two, and then Jerry said, in a widely 
different tone, " You wouldn't believe it, friend 
Franklin, but the other day the minx sent me a 
jug of soup. She ' thinks to get round me in 
that way, the artful bit of goods ; but she'll find 
herself sorely mistaken, he ! he ! he ! I knew 
she sent it," he went on, "because the cloth it 
was tied up in was marked with her married 
name. When I found out who it had come fro m, 
do you know I was going to chuck it out of 
window ; but then, you see, I can't bear anything 
to be wasted; so I put it in my cupboard there, 
and there it'll bide, friend Franklin, till I'm dead 
and gone, I can tell you." 

By this time young Benjamin had laid the logs 
in the grate ; and having taken from his pocket 
the tinder-box and matches with which his god- 



PLEASUKE HUNTING; 173 

father had provided liini (for Uncle Benjamin 
knew well enough it would be idle to look for 
such things in the miser's room), he was begin- 
ning to chip away with the flint and steel, as he 
knelt in front of the grate. 

No sooner, however, did the sound of the re- 
peated clicking smite the miser's ear, than he 
darted from the bedstead, as if some sudden terror 
had seized upon his soul ; and, rushing towards the 
lad, laid hold of him by the collar, and nearly 
throttled the boy, just as he was in the act of 
blowing — with his cheeks puffed out as round as 
a football — at a stray spark that had fallen on 
the tinder. 

"What are you going to do? what are you 
going to do, boy ?" the old miser shrieked, while 
he trembled from head to foot, as if palsy-stricken. 
" You can't light a fire there; you'll set the 
chimney in a blaze." 

"Haugh! haugh! haugh!" roared Uncle Ben- 
jamin, derisively. £i Set your chimney in a blaze > 
Jerry ! Why it has never had a fire in it since 
I've known you. There, go along with you. man ; 
there's no fear of your having to pay for the en- 
gines : the flue's as free of soot as a rnaster-sweep 
on a Sunday, I'll swear. Besides, I'm frozen, 
Jerry : chilled to the very marrow, and must have 
just a handful of hot embers in the grate to warm 
me — at least, that is if I'm to sit here any longer, 
and tell you anything about your Mary ; for while 
you were raving and cursing just now, I hadn't 
an opportunity of edging in a' word about the 
girl, remember." 

"Well, I dare say! I dare say!" whined out 
the old miser, divided between the fear of fire and 
his curiosity as to the u circumstances " of his run- 
away daughter. " But you'll promise not to make 
much of a flame, won't you now, good lad ? Be- 



174 YOUNG BENJAMIN FRANKLIN. 

sides," lie added, " I can't bear to see wood burnt 
extravagantly; and yon don't know how close 
and hot this room does become with even the least 
bit of fire." 

" JNo ! nor do you know much about tliat either,, 
Jerry, I'm thinking," giggled Uncle Benjamin. 
" There, go back to your seat, man, and listen 
quietly to what I've got to say about your child. 
Come, you shall ■ have all the wood that's left ; 
and, bless me ! we sha'n't burn a penn'orth of 
it altogether." 

The niggard suffered himself to be led back to 
the bedstead by his visitor; while young Ben, 
who had now lighted the smaller twigs, remained 
kneeling in front of the stove, blowing away at 
the burning branches, in order to kindle the mass. 

" Well, you know, Jerry," proceeded the uncle, 
c< I saw your Mary at the Conventicle last sabbath 
morning ?" , 

"Did you! did you!" cried the old fellow; 
u and what did she say ? Is she sorry for her dis- 
obedience? Does the jade repent, and want to 
come back again to me — eh — eh ?" 

There was no time for Uncle Benjamin to answer 
the questions ; for a loud cry from the boy at the 
fire made the pair of them start to their feet in an 
instant. 

The dry twigs, with which the grate had been 
nearly filled, had — with young Ben's continued 
puffing — become ignited all at once ; and as the 
long tongue of flame licked into the narrow mouth 
of the flue, the little fellow looked up the chimney, 
and fancied he could see something a-light there ; 
so the next minute he cried aloud, " The chimney's 
a-fire, I'm sure ! I can see something burning in 
it!" 

" Something burning in the chimney ! — what ! 
— what!" roared the distracted miser, as he tore 



PLEASURE HUNTING. 175 

his gray locks, and gesticulated as wildly as a 
maniac. 

The boy, who was still on his knees, with his 
head twisted on one side, as he watched the smoul- 
dering mass up the flue, seized one of the largest 
logs that he had placed against the wall, and 
thrust .it far up the chimney, so as to rake down 
the ignited mass. 

"AVhat would you do, boy ? what would you 
do ? It's my bag — my bag of money that's burn- 
ing there, I tell you!" and no sooner had the 
miser roared out the words, than a golden shower 
of guineas poured down the mouth of the chim- 
ney, and fell in a heap into the very midst of the 
blazing logs and embers. 

The miser was fairly crazed, as he saw his trea- 
sure descend, in a cataract as it were, into the 
very heart of the fire ; and, in the frenzy of the 
moment, he thrust his bony hands into the midst 
of the burning wood, and dragged the heated 
coins, handful by handful, from out the flames ; 
till, writhing with the agony of his burnt palms, 
he was forced to fling the pieces down on the 
floor : and there they rolled about, some falling 
between the chinks of the planks, and others 
strewing the boards so thickly that the wretched, 
squalid little garret seemed at last to be paved 
with gold. 

Then the old hunks fell upon his knees, and 
scrambled after the coins, crying like a child the 
while ; but presently, roused by a sudden fury, 
he sprang wildly to his feet again, and seizing one 
of the flaring brands he had just thrown under the 
grate, screamed as he whirled it madly in the air, 
• ; Begone, robbers! thieves! begone with you! 
It was Mary that sent you here to do this ; she 
told you where my money was hid. Curses on 
you all! begone, begone, I say !'' 



176 YOUNG BENJAMIN FKANKLIN. 

It was no time to parley with the frantic man ; 
so Uncle Benjamin pushed his nephew out of the 
miser's reach, and then, as he thrust the boy into 
the passage, closed the door before the maniac 
had time to harm either little Ben or himself. 

And as the couple descended the creaking stairs, 
they could hear the old niggard in his frenzy, 
raving and sobbing, while he barred and bolted 
his garret door; and then counting the pieces, 
as he collected the remains of his treasure, crying, 
fci One, two ! curse the girl ! three, four, five ! curse 
her and hers, for ever and ever !" 

Rational Animal. — No. 5. 

u What is money to me, my friend ?" exclaimed 
the inmate of the next garret they visited, after 
Uncle Benjamin had narrated, to the young man 
they found alone with his books there, the scene 
that had just occurred at the lodgings of old Jerry 
the miser. . • 

u I care not to hive any of this human honey, 
Master Franklin ; for it is honey that the golden- 
bellied wasps of the world distil only from weeds 
and tares. The sweet yellow stuff may be tooth- 
some to man in his second childhood ; but to 
me there is a sickliness about it that clogs and 
deadens the finer tastes, and natural cravings of 
mankind." 

Young Ben gazed in all the muteness of deep 
wonder at the speaker. Everything around him : 
the dingy and cheerless attic — the cold, empty 
grate — the scanty bedding — the spare and crazy 
furniture — the lean cupboard, with its solitary 
milk-can and crust of bread — all told the boy, 
even inexpert as he was at deciphering the sundry 
little conventional signs as to a person's " circum- 
stances " in life, that the poor garreteer had no 



PLEASURE HUNTING. 177 

more of the world's comforts to console him than 
either the drunkard or the miser. 

And vet the poverty seemed to invest the man 
with all the moral dignity of a hermit ; whereas 
it had appeared to steep the others in all the 
squalor of habitual mendicancy. How different, 
*oo, was he in look and tone from either of those 
they had previously visited ! There was a gentle-* 
ness and a music in his voice, as if his very heart- 
strings vibrated as he spake; and a high-nauiied 
expression in his features, that lighted up his 
blanched countenance, like sunshine upon snow,. 
His forehead was fair, and round as an ivory 
dome ; and his full liquid eyes were intensely 
biue, and deep, as the sea far away from land i 
while, as he talked of the world's vanities and 
glories, there was the same passionate play of 
nostril, and the same proud working of the neck,, 
as marks a blood-horse's sense of his own power,. 
when pawing the ground at his feet. 

"But the long-eared Midases of the world, 
Master Franklin/' the poet continued, "they who 
rejoice in the power of transmuting all they touch 
into gold — must be ever deaf to the grand haimo- 
nies of life and nature ; ay, and blind as coipses r 
too — having their eyes for ever closed with pieces- 
of money — to the beauty which floods the earth 
with light, colour, and glory ; as though it were 
the very halo of the Godhead shining over crea- 
tion. Such, as these affect to speak with, pity of 
the poor poet ; but, prithee, friend, who so poor 
in heart and soul as Dives himself? — as Dives*, 
who cannot taste a crumb of the ideal feast that is- 
spread even for the mendicant Lazarus ? — Dives,. 
in whose leathern ear the sea- shell sings not of 
the mighty mysteries of the ocean-deep, and to 
whom the little lark never warbles of the crimson 
grandeur of the sky, the air, and earth, at break 



178 YOUtfG BENJAMIN FRANKLIX. 

of day ? — Dives, in whose dull eyes the wild 
flowers show no grace, nor the tiny insects the 
least touch of art? — Dives, the veriest pauper, 
amidst the richest of all riches— he of the stone 
heart and leaden brain? Was Andrew Marvel 
poor, think you, when the libertine Charles sought 
to bribe him into silence ? Not he ; for he was 
richer than the king in • honour and dignity — rich 
enough to be able to spurn the royal bribe, even 
though he was so poor in pocket as to be forced 
-to borrow the means for a dinner the moment 
after." 

Little Ben had never heard such utterances be- 
fore ; and as he sat there, still staring intently at 
the speaker, he was marvelling which was right — 
his uncle, who taught him that he must either 
save or be a slave ; or this young man, whose very 
dignity and independence of spirit seemed to 
spring from his contempt for mere worldly wealth. 

The elder Benjamin could almost guess what 
was passing in his nephew's mind; nevertheless, 
it was neither the time nor the place to clear up 
the difficulty ; so he remained as silent as the lad 
.himself, and merely nodded his approbation as 
the poet continued. 

" Nor would I have the world's wealth, friend, 
at the world's price," the young man ran on. 
44 What if the stomach icill sometimes crave for 
food, at least I have an ethereal banquet here in my 
little stock of books " — pointing to the few shelves 
slung against the wall — " a banquet that the gods 
themselves might revel in ; ay, and a banquet, too, 
that the pampered belly has seldom any zest for. 
These are the men, Master Franklin," he cried, 
his eyes glowing with the fervour of his soul, as 
he turned to his favourite authors, " who are the 
blessed comforters of the poor, if the poor but 
knew them, as poor I do ; these the worthies that 



PLEASURE HUSTDsG. 179 

•care not how humble the dwelling they enter ; 
these the true hearts that have a good and kind 
word to whisper in every ear. As Francis Bacon 
says, they are the ' interpreters ' between God and 
us — the ' interpreters ' of that subtle myth which 
makes the soul of man a mere grub here and a 
butterfly hereafter; the great translators of the 
mighty poem of creation — each rendering, as did 
the -Septuagint of old, some special canticle, or 
glorious passage in the Book, and each catching 
the sense and spirit of the great Original, as if by 
inspiration. Can a man be poor, friend," he 
asked proudly, " when he can find any amount of 
treasure in these volumes, merely by digging a 
little beneath the surface for it? Have I no 
jewels, when in this casket there are gems, brighter 
and more precious than ever adorned a monarch's 
brow ? Have I no possessions, when such an in- 
heritance as this has been bequeathed to me ? — no 
grounds, when I have these interminable gardens 
and academic groves about me to wander in as I list 
— gardens that are planted with exquisite taste, 
and filled with all the flowers of the Elysian fields 
of immortality — flowers that bloom for ever in the 
bosom after they are plucked, and whose perfume 
blends with the soul, till the mind itself becomes 
sweetened with their grace ?" 

The boy was entranced as he listened. He had 
never before heard words uttered with such ardour; 
they came ringing in his ear, and stirred his soul 
like a trumpet. The only zeal he had ever seen 
displayed as yet had been among the fanatics 
of the conventicle to which his father belonged ; 
but here was a man speaking with all the fervour 
of the most devout religion- upon the grandeur 
and glory of mere poetry ; a man loving poverty 
with all the enthusiasm of an ascetic — not from 
any superstitious delight in the daily martvrdom 

N 2 



180 YOUNG BENJAMIN FRANKLIN. 

of the flesh, but because his taste found more re- 
fined joy in the sublimities of nature and thought, 
than in the sickly sweetmeats of the world; a 
man worshipping the divine element of beauty 
and truth in all things, and loathing the world's 
vanities and sensualities as the great uglinesses of 
life. It was impossible not to have faith in him. 
His creed was manifestly not a mere affected sen- 
timent, but an all-absorbing passion — a passion 
that flashed like lightning in his e}'es, and stirred 
his limbs like branches tossed by a hurricane. 

"How different," presently he continued, talk- 
ing half to himself till he became fired again with 
his subject, " does the possession of such wealth as 
this make us, from what the world's wealth does I 
Your money-riches are. sure, sooner or later, to 
transform the heart into a mere iron chest ; a coffer 
that no human key can open. They breed only 
lust and greed, as the muck-heap hatches vipers, 
and case the soul in an impenetrable armour of 
selfishness ; whereas the treasures of the mind are 
as generous as wine to the spirit, unlocking the 
heart and ,the whole nature. Did these noble 
fellows," he cried, as he seized the volumes that 
lay on the table before him, and hugged them 
fondly to his bosom, "play the misers with their 
precious possessions? Did these lords of Wis- 
dom's broad manor fence in their estate, and keep 
the ever-green fields of their fancy and philosophy 
to themselves ? or did they give them as *a park 
to all the world, for even the poorest to ramble 
and sport in ? Yes, they shared their gifts and 
gems freely with such as me, and so made poor 
me almost as rich as themselves. And what 
would / do now? why, I'd fall upon my very 
knees to you, if I could but get you and this lad 
here to share this same wealth with me in return 
• — only to make you feel the same foretaste of 



PLEASURE HUNTING. 181 

Leaven as I do, when communing with these great 
souls, spirit to spirit, and giving back love for 
love." 

Then he paused -for a moment ; and suddenly 
tossing his head till his long hair shook like a 
lion's mane, he scowled at some imaginary social 
jackanapes, -as he asked indignantly, ' ; Who- dares 
taunt me with lack of fortune or want of fine 
friends, when I have Will Shakspeare here day 
after day by my side, humming the sweet music 
of his sonnets in my ear ? Why, if I knew all the 
high and mighty carriage-folk of the town, could 
it be half as grand to ride out with them, as it is to 
travel with the spirit of John Milton into the very 
heavens themselves, and hear the blind old poet 
pour forth his wondrous paean on the light ? Can 
such as I feel it a privation to be denied the fel- 
lowship of empty-headed lords and dukes, when 
here, in my garret, I can have the best of all good 
company — the very pick of the noblest blood that 
ever flowed in human veins ? Am I sad ? then 
can I not have Butler here to make me laugh 
with the quaint wit and odd logic of his Kudi- 
bras ? If the hours hang heavy with me, are not 
Herrick, Carew, and Suckling ready to sing to me ? 
Do I want to learn how the world wags ? why 
Massinger, and Ford, and Webster, and Beaumont 
and Fletcher, ay, and Shakspeare himself will come 
at my beck to show me how the puppets are moved 
b}' every passion, and to lay open niy own and every 
other heart before my eyes — as if poor human 
nature was but a piece of clever clockwork. Or if 
I long to travel, is there not brave Ealeigh wait- 
ing to take me with him round the world ? Or if 
my mood be more sedate, can I not invite old 
Burton here to charm me with his wonderful 
lore of melancholy ? ay, and even if I please, get 
Xewton, or Bacon, or Hobbes to talk philosophy 



182 YOUNG BENJAMIN FRANKLIN. 

with me, and lay bare the subtle mechanism of the 
universe itself? Ah, my friend !" he added, as his 
face beamed with all the refined pride of his heart,. 
" this is the royal prerogative of intellect— the 
blessed privilege that comes from a devout love 
of books. It can make the poorest among us 
richer than the richest ; grant luxuries to those in 
want, that even the beef-witted Croesus himself 
could not purchase ; and give the most luckless in 
the world the right of fellowship with the most 
gifted and most illustrious of mankind." 

Eational Animal. — Ko. 6. 

Again the scene shifted, and the lad and his 
uncle were away in the suburbs of the town, at 
the shooting and hunting, " box" of one who 
thought "sport" to be the great charm of life. 
Here, as they entered, a kennel of fox-hounds 
made the woods ring with their cries ; and dogs of 
every breed met them at every turn. There 
were spare and high-haunched greyhounds, ready 
coupled for coursing; gentle-looking and docile 
pointers and setters, with their eyes ever fixed on 
their master; and shock-coated water-dogs, and 
wiry little rat-dogs, with their teeth glistening 
like gintraps, as they snarled at the new comers ; 
and ugly-looking bandy-legged bull-dogs, too,, 
with mouths and jowls like prize-fighters. In 
one of the outhouses was a long backed ferret, 
with hair as white and eyes as pink as an 
albino, ready for the next day's sport at the rab- 
bit warren. In another there were globular wire 
cages full of brown rats, restless as a knot of 
worms, that had been trapped to s.ettle some im- 
portant wager as to how many of the vermin 
little "Wasp," with the gintrap-like teeth, could 
kill within the hour. 



PLEASURE HUNTING. 183 

The stables were filled with as many different- 
kinds of horses as the yards swarmed with different- 
breeds of dogs. Here was the satin-coated hunter, 
with limbs almost as slender as those of the grey- 
hounds ; the sturdy little shooting-pony, whose legs 
seemed as short and thick as those of a fourpost 
bedstead ; and the fast-trotting cob, that had done 
its fifteen miles within the hour, and won no end 
of money in its time. 

The interior of the house, too, was as typical of 
the tastes of the owner as the outbuildings them- 
selves. The little hall bristled with antlers and 
buffalo horns jutting from the walls, and from the 
hat-pegs hung huge jack fishing-boots and hunt- 
ing- whips ; whilst the rooms within were literally 
crowded with tokens of the " sporting character " 
they belonged to. The sides of the chamber 
into which they were shown were covered with 
prints of celebrated winners of races ; and paint- 
ings of favourite horses, with some favourite 
groom standing at their head ; and representa- 
tions of far-famed fast trotters, with a gentle- 
man in a tall skeleton gig with big misty wheels, 
in the act of scrambling through some prodigious 
feat of velocity. There were engravings, too, of 
sundry shirtless heroes, in knee-breeches and 
" ankle-jacks," with muscles as big as cannon- 
balls under the skin, striking an attitude of self- 
defence ; and memorials of some illustrious encoun- 
ter between two chestnuty and fiery-faced game 
cocks, as close cropped as felons, and with spurs 
as long as cobblers' awls fitted to their legs. Then 
there were coloured sets of pictures representative 
of c ''going to cover," "breaking cover," in "full 
cry," and " in at the death ;" with others of " part- 
ridge shooting," and " wild- duck shooting," and 
bits of " still life ;" together with a huge illustra- 
tion of some extraordinary leap at a " steeple 



184 YOUNG BENJAMIN FRANKLIN. 

chase," where a few of the horses and riders were 
floundering in the brook, others flying through 
the air, and others scrambling with their steeds 
up the opposite bank. Moreover, there were glass- 
cases filled with two or three stuffed partridges 
feeding among some imitation stubble ; and ano- 
ther enclosing an enormous preserved pike, with 
his scales as highly varnished as a coach -pan el. 
Upon the table lay foxes' brushes, set in silver 
handles, and made into little whisks for dusting 
knick-knacks ; and foxes' heads mounted as snuff- 
boxes ; and stags' feet, with little silver hoofs, 
fitted to the blades of knives ; while high above 
the mantelpiece was stretched a huge wild swan 
with widespread wings, that measured goodness 
knows how many feet from tip to tip, and which 
had been shot by the owner of the establishment, 
in the winter of such and such a year. In the 
different corners of the room, too, stood the several 
implements of the sportsman's art : fishing-rods, 
and double-barrelled guns, and powder-flasks, and 
leathern wallets covered with netting, and riding 
a,nd driving whips, and dog-whistles, and spears 
for otter-hunting, and felt hats with the crowns 
wound round with all kinds of lines and flies, 
and brown leathern leggings, and shooting-boots 
as heavy and clumsy -looking as navigators', ay, 
and boxing-gloves, basket-hilted single-sticks, 
targets, and cases of duelling pistols too. 

The sportsman himself was busy at his morning 
meal of bread and chine, with a tankard of foaming 
home-brewed ale by his side. The manner in which 
lie scrambled down the food — coupled with the 
scarlet coat and black velvet cap in which he was 
costumed — told that he was in haste to join the 
hounds somewhere ; and as he munched away, he 
described to his visitors, with his mouth full, 
what a glorious day he expected to have ; as Squire 



PLEASURE HUNTING. 185 

So-and-so had recently bought a score of foxes, 
and turned them all loose on his estate, for really 
their subscription pack had pretty well cleared the 
country before that. Then he remembered some 
particular magnificent run they had had some 
seasons back, and gave the couple a vivid de- 
scription of the chase, as he filled his pocket flask 
with brandy from the liqueur-case. Next, as he 
sat down to exchange his slippers for the highly- 
polished top-boots that stood beside the fireplace, 
he wanted to know whether the young squire 
there, alluding to little Ben, had ever been at a 
hunt, and told the lad, as he screwed his mouth 
up, till his face looked like a knocker, and tugged 
away at the boot-hooks, that a good run was the 
finest thing in life, and that there was nothing like 
fox-hunting in the world. After that he fell to 
hastily admiring the boy's figure, asking how old 
he was, and calling him a nice little light weight. 
Then he wanted to know whether he had ever been 
licked at school, and whether he had taken any 
lessons yet in sparring; and said he wished he 
could stop and put the gloves on for a minute, and 
have a round or two with him. Presently he asked 
Uncle Ben whether he had heard of the match that 
he had coming off shortly : he had staked a hun- 
dred pounds that he would bring down nineteen 
pigeons out of twenty — and he was sure to win. 
for he had bagged thirty brace of birds in a few 
hours only a few days back, and, what was more, 
he could snuff a candle with his duelling-pistols 
at twenty paces, three times out of four. The^ 
as he bustled about the room (rummaging among 
the litter of fish-cans, bullet-moulds, boxing-gloves, 
and books of flies, now for his riding-gloves, and 
now for some particular pet whip that he wanted), 
he told the boy that if he would come over some 
day, he'd give him a ride on the pony ; and take 



186 YOUNG BENJAMIN FRANKLIN. 

liim out for a day's coursing, and then lie should 
see some prime sport if he liked, when the dogs 
slipped their couples. Wiry, he had one of the 
finest greyhounds in the world, the sporstsman 
said, and had refused a hundred guineas for lier 
over and over again. But he only wished he could 
stop longer with them, he added, as he slipped 
his greatcoat over his scarlet jacket ; though he 
wouldn't miss the meet that day not to please his 
own father, that he wouldn't. So he shook them 
both heartily by the hand, and then hurrying to the 
door, leapt into the saddle on the hunter young 
Benjamin had noted in the stable but a few 
minutes before ; and digging his spurs into the 
flanks of the steed, dashed down the road, waving 
his little nut-shell of a hunting-cap to young Ben 
as he turned round in his saddle, and cracking his 
whip shouted, " Yoyicks ! Yup ! Yup ! Yoyicks !" 
to the delighted and astonished boy. 

Kattonal Animal. — No. 7. 

The next character they visited differed again 
from all they had seen before. 

It was neither " sport," nor poetry, nor gold, 
nor drink, nor yet flowers that delighted this one, 
but merely " antiquities," as they are called. A 
mere bit of old brick — a tile marked with the 
stamp of one of the Boman legions was sufficient 
to throw the old antiquary into an ecstasy of 
enthusiasm. A " celt " — an axe with a rude flint 
head — had greater joy for him than the finest 
work of art in the world. His house was filled 
with cabinets and glass-cases, in which were stored 
heaps of what a good housewife would have deno- 
minated " rubbish," but which, in the antiquary's 
eyes were far more precious than gold. The old 
oak chairs here were so knubbly with their carv- 



PLEASURE HUNTING. 187 

ings, tbat it was impossible to rest either the back 
or arms against them, without their leaving a series 
of lumps and bumps on the flesh ; the spoons were 
all "apostle spoons," as they are called, and so 
knobby that they could not be held with any 
comfort ; the walls were hung with bits of tape- 
stry that were as ragged as a beggar's smock ; 
the pictures, queer old things, with gilt back- 
grounds, and figures of saints as limp looking as 
your " lean and slippered pantaloon ;" the China 
too was of the queerest shapes and patterns, — while 
the ornaments consisted of small bits of tesselated 
pavement dug up from some ancient Eoman 
station, and which seemed like fragments of petri- 
fied draft boards ; besides little green crusted and 
worn bronze urns, and small Egyptian clay figures, 
that had been found buried with mummies^ 
together with cracked Etruscan vases, and noseless- 
Grecian busts, and statues, without arms, that had 
much the look of Greenwich pensioners " in the 
abstract." Then there were satin cases filled with 
coins that had no more impression left on them 
than a charity boy's metal buttons ; copies of 
hieroglyphic inscriptions, and models of the Par- 
thenon, and Colosseum ; tiny copies of Cleopatra's 
needle, and Trajan's Column, and an infinity of 
odds and ends besides : all of which had cost no end 
of money, time, and patience to collect, as well as 
study and learning to comprehend ; and which the 
queer little old gentleman (who was only too 
delighted to exhibit them to little Ben) frankly 
confessed, as he led the couple round the place, 
that he had nearly ruined himself in getting to- 
gether, and he had serious thoughts, he said, of 
leaving it all to the nation after his death. 



188 YOUNG BENJAMIN FRANKLIN. 



Eational Animal. — No. 8. 

After this the lad was conducted to an inventor's 
house, and here he fonnd the rooms filled with 
curious models of machinery, and working-draw- 
ings and plans of the queerest looking apparatus ; 
while the doors and windows were fitted with the 
strangest contrivances by way of fastenings. 
Here were extraordinary kinds of pumps, and novel 
arrangements of water-wheels, and ships with re- 
volving sails, like windmills, and flying machines, 
and velocipedes, and vessels to travel urider the 
water or along the bottom of the sea, and boats to 
sail upon laud, and plans for heating houses too by 
flues sunk into the earth to such a depth as always 
to insure an equable temperature without the cost 
of fire. Besides designs for perpetual motion, and 
projects for discovering the longitude, and new mo- 
tive powers, and plans for obtaining an inexpen- 
sive and inexhaustible force by taking advantage 
of the magnetism of the earth. 

16 This notion alone," said the sanguine schemer, 
as he pointed to some pet notion, " is worth twenty 
thousand guineas at least;" then "that," he told 
them, "was a sure fortune to any one," whilst if 
another " only answered," it would be impossible 
for any one to estimate the amount of money it 
would realize. 

Little Ben looked with inordinate wonder at 
the individual, as he heard him speak of the im- 
mense value of his projects one after another ; and 
marvelled how, if he was the possessor of such ex- 
traordinary wealth, there should be so poverty- 
stricken an air about his dwelling. 

Nor was the boy's astonishment in any way 
decreased when he heard the man — as he stood on 
the doorsteps assuring them that lie wouldn't take 



PLEASURE HUNTING, 189 

a hundred thousand guineas, if any one would lay 
the money down on the stones before him, for even 
a half-share in his flying machine — whisper imme- 
diately afterwards in his uncle's ear, just before 
leaving, that he'd consider it a great favour if he 
would let him have half a dollar for a day or two. 

Rational Animal. — Xo. 9. 

From the inventor the couple wended their 
way to the chief astronomer of the town ; and this 
man they found scarcely able to speak to them, 
for he was busy sweeping the heavens for a new 
planet which, after years of laborious calculation, 
he had ascertained should exist somewhere be- 
tween the orbits of Jupiter and Saturn. He had 
been engaged in making observations upon this 
matter almost night and clay, he said, for the last 
twelvemonth, and had laid out hundreds upon a 
new reflecting telescope — the speculum of which 
alone had cost more than half the money — for he 
was determined to make the discovery all his own. 
To him there was no pleasure but in watching 
the stars — no use for money but in the purchase 
of equatorials, astronomical clocks, transit-instru- 
ments, artificial horizons, mural-circles, and mi- 
crometer-glasses, etc. etc. 

Rational Animal. — Xo. 10. 

The visit to the astronomer was followed by a 
peep into the household of an entomologist, where 
the boy found the study of the stars replaced by 
that of insects. 

It was no longer distant worlds, but the tiniest 
things on earth that absorbed the entire time and 
means of this individual. Here cases of spitted 
butterflies and cockchafers delighted the bis: 



190 I'OUXG BEXJAMIX FRANKLIX. 

baby, christened " philosopher." Here the tele- 
scope was laid aside for the microscope, and the 
every-day world of human passion ignored for 
the hidden one of animalcular life and habits. 
The inhabitants of a drop of water were, to the 
magnified vision of this particular sage, creatures 
of the liveliest interest ; whereas those of the next 
street were hardly worth a moment's thought. To 
see the blood circulate in the web of a frog's foot, 
this worthy spent pounds and pounds upon an 
*' eighth," but to know how the heart of man was 
stirred he would not give a doit. What an ex- 
quisite charm there was to him in enlarging the 
dust of a butterfly's wing to the magnitude of an 
ostrich's feathers, or in looking at the proboscis of 
a blue-bottle under a " high power j" but how 
" stale, flat, and unprofitable " to bring even a " low 
power " to bear upon the parasites of society, or 
to scrutinize the economy of the human blood- 
sucker ! In a word, to brother man not the slightest 
heed, nor even a penny was given ; whereas to 
brother tadpole an entire life and a small fortune 
were devoted. 

Even little Ben, as he was whirled, so to speak, 
from one house to another by his uncle, and intro- 
duced to the most opposite characters in rapid 
succession (for the old man strove to bring out 
the " high lights " of the picture of human life, in 
all the black and white of strong contrast), could 
hardly help philosophizing, in his own simple way, 
upon the puzzling problem that had been brought 
under his notice. 

" How strange," mused the lad to himself, as he 
jogged along, " one man fiu ds no pleasure but in 
studying the stars, another no delight but in con- 
templating insects ; one in perpetually spying 
through magnifying glasses at little specks of 



PLEASURE HOTTING. 191 

light, which are ' millions of miles away ;' the 
other for ever looking through the same kind 
of glasses at tiny creatures that are almost as 
far removed from himself! One declares there 
is no happiness in the world like that of sport- 
ing ; another vows the only true joy is to be 
found in books ; a third that it lies in show and 
dress. One sacrifices everything to get drink, 
another to get money ; this one to collect weeds 
and wild flowers, and that man to collect bits of 
old pavement, old tiles, and vases. How odd 
it is ! and one and all, too, are ready to give 
np their lives and fortunes to their particular 
pursuit." 

The view of life seemed as inconsistent to the 
little fellow as the jumble of scenes in a dream. 

"Ha! my man," smiled Uncle Benjamin, 
delighted to listen to the boy's reflections, " I dare 
say the riddle of human nature does puzzle you a 
good bit ; and, to tell the truth, it occasionally puts 
me to my wits' end to comprehend it — even old 
stager as I am, and up to most of the antics of the 
mummers too. To run the round of one's ac- 
quaintances in this way, lad, and see the different 
characters one meets with in his journeys from 
house to house, is to my mind very much like 
going over a large lunatic asylum, and learning, as 
you pass from cell to cell, the various queer manias 
with which the several inmates are possessed." 

But there was no time just then to reason on 
the matter : the first object was to see and observe ; 
to draw conclusions was an after consideration. So 
on the old man and boy hurried to inspect some 
more of the shows in the great " Vanity Fair." 

" Walk up ! walk up !" cried Uncle Ben to the 
lad as they approached the next human curiosity, 
*"' and see now the most celebrated epicure in all 
the town." 



192 YOUNG BEXJAMIN FRANKLIN. 



Rational Animal. — No. 11. 

They met the worthy, hobbling along with a 
punnet of tomatas in his hand (with one elephan- 
tine foot done up in flannel, and encased in a huge 
list slipper), on his way to the fishmonger's at the 
end of the street where he lived ; and there, as he 
stood picking out a prime bit of salmon — "just 
a pound or two from the thick part of the fish " — 
he told them how he had been suffering from his 
44 old friend the gout;" though he was happy to 
say his dyspepsia was a leettle better, for he had 
been dieting himself a good bit of late. He had 
cut off his "night cap" of maraschino-punch after 
supper, he said ; for he had found out at last that 
that had been doing him a deal of harm, though, 
it was delicious tipple to be sure. Then he had 
given up his toast and caviar in the middle of the 
day ; for his medical man had told him caviar 
was too rich for him, and that really his stomach 
was so weak that he must be most careful about 
what he ate — most careful. 

" You see, Franklin,' ' continued the gourmand, 
as he jerked at his acre of waistcoat, that was dappled 
with gravy spots ail down the front, and tried to 
force it over the huge wen of a stomach that 
bulged out like the distended crop of an enormous; 
pouter pigeon — " You see, Franklin, I make flesh 
so fast that, do what I will, I can't prevent myself 
running into corpulency. "Why, I've even reduced 
my quantum of Madeira, I give you my word, to« 
half a pint per diem; and if there's one thing I 
like more than another," he added, by way of 
parenthesis, u it certainly ts a glass of good Ma- 
deira — but it must be good, you know, Franklin 
— good, or it's apt to turn acid with me ; for my 
medical man assures me all fermented liquors 



PLEASURE HUNTING. 193 

make fat. But though I go on with my dinner-pills 
(and my doctor, I must say, has given me one of 
the best pills of that kind I ever met with), and 
take more exercise than I used, still, the deuce is 
in it, I can't keep the bulk down — cant keep it 
under, Franklin, anyhow ;" and again the worthy 
gave another twitch at the waistcoat, that would 
keep rucking up over the rolls of his abdomen. 

Then, having at length settled about the fish, 
he slipped one arm into that of the elder Benja- 
min, and resting the hand of the other on the 
shoulder of the younger one (for he had given 
the boy the little basket of love-apples to carry), 
he began hobbling back to his house between the 
two, stopping every now and then to writhe with 
the agony of some passing twinge. 

" Why I should be plagued with this infernal 
gout as I am," he exclaimed, as he stood still in 
the street, and screwed his face up till it assumed 
the expression of a compressed gutta-percha head, 
" I'm sure I can't tell. My doctor says it's all 
stomach; and heaven knows no man can be more 
particular about his feeding than I am. Indeed, I 
never could bear coarse food, Franklin — never. 
I think every one of my friends will allow that. 
But the misfortune is, you see, I have such delicate 
nerves, though few persons would think it, per- 
haps, in a man of my build ; but I can assure you 
my belief is that it's nerves — nerves — or I may 
say, indeed, a natural want of stamina — that is at 
the bottom of all my sufferings. The least thing I 
take seems to disagree with me. Xow what was my 
dinner yesterday : why, nothing could have been 
simpler in the world, Franklin — nothing. First 
I had just a little vermicelli soup, with a sprink- 
ling of grated parmesan over it. By-the-by, Frank- 
lin," he asked suddenly, as he stopped and looked 
Uncle Benjamin full in the face, " did you ever try 

o 



194 YOUNG- BENJAMIN FRANKLIN. 

the grated cheese with the vermicelli ? Wei], do ! I 
give yoii my word it's a marvellous improvement 
— m-m-mar-vellous ! Then there was a little water- 
souci ; and you know there's nothing lighter than 
water-souci in the world ; but it's a favourite dish 
of mine, Franklin, for, 'pon my honour, I think it's 
the most delicate flavour in life : and with this, 
of course, there was just a simple glass of Madeira 
to wash it down. Well, after that came a small 
dish of lamb chops, breaded, with sauce piquante, 
for you know I am quite alone, Franklin," (he 
added, parenthetically,) " and can't indulge inheavy 
joints, even if my poor stomach would allow me ; 
or else, I must confess, I certainly should have 
preferred a kibbob of mutton — did you ever eat 
a kibbob, Franklin ? Well 9 take my advice, and 
have one im-me-diately, and you'll live to bless me 
for the counsel — and besides these things, there 
was just a couple of kidneys sauteed with cham- 
pagne, and a field-fare or two stuffed with 
juniper berries, and served with juniper sauce 
— the latter a thing that my cook does divinely, 
1 can assure you — dee-vine] y ! And then for 
sweets — though I'm not much of a sweet-eater, 
certainly — there was a — let me see, what did I 
have yesterday ?" and again he made them both 
stand still as he reflected — " cocoa-nut pudding, 
was it ? no, no ! that was the day when Tom 
Skeffington dined with me, and he went into such 
raptures about the dish, and would make me give 
him the receipt for it. Oh yes, I know now, it 
was " (and he screwed his face again into all the 
distortions of a gorgon's head, as he interjected — 
" Hang the gout !) — it was — what is such a special 
favourite of mine — a cranberry tart, with a cus- 
tard or two. You see, Franklin, the custard takes 
off the roughness of the cranberry ; and if it has 
just a dash of vanilla in it, by way of flavouring, 



PLEASURE HUNTING. 195 

I give yon my word it's most luscious — most 1 — i — 
luscious!" he repeated. "You try it. Franklin; 
now do, just to oblige me, for I'm sure you'll think 
it one of the greatest treats in life. 

' ; Well, now, although that — with just an olive or 
two, and a griddle cake to relish my wine, with a 
thimbleful of cherry-water as a digester to finish 
— constituted the whole of my yesterday's dinner," 
the epicure went on, u and I'm sure, as I said 
before, nothing could be simpler or lighter ; still, 
you'd hardly believe it, sir, but when I got up this 
morning, my tongue was furred — quite furred, I 
give you my honour ; and it wasn't until I had 
taken a glass of brandy and soda-water, that I 
could touch the least bit of the delicious cold 
partridge-pie I had got for breakfast." 

By this time they had reached the gourmand's 
house ; and as Uncle Benjamin was preparing to 
depart, the epicure held his hand firmly locked in 
his, as he kept shaking it while he said, " Xo, no, 
Franklin; I couldn't think of letting you go in 
this way. You really must come in now ; why, I 
thought you'd stop and take pot-luck with me to- 
day. I should make no stranger of you, you 
know. There's only that little bit of salmon you 
saw me buying — (though it was a splendid fish, to 
be sure ; and with a little cucumber, I should 
think, would eat superbly — sa-perily /) and just a 
wild duck, with a few little kickshaws, of course, 
besides ; and something or other by way of pastry 
— such as some pine-apple beignets — to wind up 
with. Well, I can't offer you anything better 
to-day. But I'll tell you what, Franklin, if 
you'll promise to honour me another time, and 
only let me know forty-eight hours beforehand, 
why, I'll have something recherche for you — truly 
ree-cherche, I will, indeed." 

But Uncle Benjamin only shook his head ; 

o 2 



196 YOUNG BENJAMIN" FRANKLIN. 

whereupon the other added, " Oh, I don't mean to 
say I should put myself much out of the way for 
you ; but we will have just a nice little dinner — 
that's all — one of the bachelor tete-a-tete affairs, 
that I believe I can manage as well as most people. 
Say, for instance, a few smelts and a canvas-back 
duck stewed with turnips. By-the-by, did you 
ever taste the canvas-backs that way ? They're 
simply delicious, I can assure you — &ee-licioii3 !■ — 
especially if you insist upon the cook browning 
the turnips well before he stews them. Ay, and 
then, my boy," he cried, as he tapped the other on 
the shoulder, " you shall taste my new sauce. Dear 
me ! I quite forgot to tell I had invented a new 
sauce — how oblivious of me, to be sure ! Well, 
you know, Franklin, I've been after the thing for 
years — indeed, for years and years I may say; but I 
never could get it to please me exactly, somehow. 
However, at last just one little condiment extra 
settled it ; and now everybody pronounces it to be 
— perfection! — simply per-r : /ection !'' he shouted, 
and enforced the merits of the article with so 
vigorous a thump on Uncle Benjamin's collar-bone 
that the old gentleman fairly staggered under the 
blow. " Oh, it's the most exquisite flavour in life, 
I give you my word. I'm going to call it," he 
ran on, "'Sauce a la' — what's his name? Lord 
bless me ! I shall forget my own name next. You 
know — I call it after the celebrated French cook 
of Louis the Fourteenth's time — the cook, you 
remember, who committed suicide because the 
fish, poor fellow ! didn't arrive till long after the 
hour the dinner was ordered for. Sad thing, 
wasn't it ? and you know they do say, Franklin, his 
bashawed lobster was a thing to eat and then die. 
But you'll come in and have just a glass of my 
Amontillado, with a teaspoonful of orange bitters 
in it — just one, now — to give you an appetite for 



PLEASURE HUNTING- 197 

your dinner, man," he added, pulling at the arm 
of the uncle as he struggled to depart. "Well, 
well, if you will go, you must, I suppose :" and 
then, as the epicure knocked at the door, he turned 
round and cried, "But, by-the-by, Franklin, 
would you mind, as you pass the corner of the next 
street, calling in at the greengrocer's there for me 
— you know the nice store where they have always 
the window stocked with such a superb show of 
the better kinds of fruits and vegetables — and tell- 
ing them to send me a punnet of their very best 
sea-kale ? Please to say it must be the very best, 
and that I've made up my mind I won't give more 
than half a dollar the basket for it; for that's 
quite enough money, I'm sure, at this time of 
year. I wouldn't trouble you, Franklin, but 
really this gout," and he made another ugly face 
as he emphasised the words, "is the most ex- 
cruciating torture, I can assure you — ex-x-croa- 
ciating !" 



Rational Animal. — No. 12. 

Nor did the gallery of character portraits cease 
here. Uncle Ben was anxious that his little 
pupil should see every phase of human eccen- 
tricity of which he could muster a specimen 
among the circle of his acquaintance. So now he 
took the lad to some inveterate politician, and let 
him see how this man's thoughts and time were 
entirely absorbed in attending vestries, and de- 
nouncing the overseers of the parish as the 
"robbers of the poor," in opposing rates, influ- 
encing elections, in declaiming at public meetings, 
and holding forth to the fuddled frequenters of 
bar-parlours in the evening, on the rascalities of all 
governments, the dishonesty of ministers, and the 



198 YOUNG benjamin franklin. 

rights of man, as well as the iniquities of the 
taxes. 

Battonal Animal. — No. 13. 

Next he would lead the little fellow to some 
gentleman turner, who spent hundreds upon a 
lathe, his rose-engines, and eccentric chucks ; 
and who passed his days in amateur carpentering 
and cabinet making, with a French polished ma- 
hogany tool-chest, and the most elegant rosewood- 
handled chisels and gimlets ; turning now ivory- 
cups and balls and chess-men, and now fanciful 
needle-cases and thimbles and tobacco-stoppers 
for his friends ; or else fashioning marquetry- work, 
or buhl work-tables, or mounting fire-screens for 
the more favoured ladies of his acquaintance. 

Eational Animal.— No. 14. 

And after this the boy would be introduced to 
some experimental chemist, and find this strange 
specimen of humanity surrounded with retorts, 
alembics, stills, crucibles, and furnaces; gasome- 
ters, thermometers, and pyrometers ; together 
with specific gravity scales, and acetometers ; 
barometers, hygrometers, and eudiometers ; blow- 
pipes, and test-tubes ; electrifying machines and 
magnets ; and, indeed, such an infinity of necro- 
mantic-looking apparatus, that made little Ben 
regard the proprietor of the laboratory more as 
sorcerer than sage. 

Then here the youth would learn that the grand 
object of life and study was to separate some lump 
of earth, or bottle of liquid, or jar of air, into its 
elements ; or to compound some new body out of the 
different kinds of matter existing in the world. 
Here he was told that the pursuit of truth for truth's 



PLEASURE HUXTTXG. 199 

own sake was the noblest tiling in life ; that poetry 
was mere prettiness, and added nothing either to 
man's knowledge of the world in which he was 
placed, nor to his progress in it ; that there was 
a profound charm in lighting on a new discovery, 
or evolving some new fact or law in nature, which 
transcended all other forms of happiness ; that 
the study of the subtle forces of creation — the 
secret affinities of things — the strange sympathy 
of this bit of matter with that, and its inexplicable 
antipathy to some other substance — the continued 
contemplation of those wondrous powers in the 
world, lying as they did at the very heart of the 
great mystery of nature and life, yielded a de- 
light — the philosopher assured the boy — that at 
once satisfied, enlightened, and elevated the mind. 

RATIONAL AXDIAL. — No. 15. 

But scarcely had the words of the natural 
philosopher died in the little fellow's ear, than he 
was in the studio of a young artist : and him he 
found as enthusiastic about ail and its glories as 
the philosopher had been about science, or the 
poet loud in his praises of poetry ; for the young 
painter spoke of the old masters with all the vene- 
ration of a zealot and the affection of a son. Now 
it was t; magnificent old Michael Angelo ;" then, 
' 'glorious old Eembrandt;" and "dear old Eu- 
bens;"' and "fine old Titian." He loved them, 
and worshipped them, every one, he said, with 
all the intensity of a woman's affection; and 
when he had gone into raptures at the mere 
remembrance of the special excellence of each, as 
the vision of their works flitted one after another 
before his mind, he asked, " V\ hat is all art but 
the highest type of power in man, even as the 
Almighty himself is the Great Artist above all, 



200 YOUNG BENJAMIN FRANKLIN. "" 

because He is the All-powerful ? Are not the 
works of God signal evidences of God's tran- 
scendent art? and is not this art the chief evi- 
dence we have of His transcendent power? We, 
lad," he said to the boy, " are but the poor copiers- 
of the one great work— the one grand tableau of 
creation, and He the Great Original : we but the 
mere shufflers of the infinite varieties of form 
about us into new arrangements, and He the 
Great Inventor of all forms and figures : we but 
the petty balancers of light and shade, He the 
great Creator of the clear and the obscure through- 
out the world. And whilst it costs us poor painters 
inordinate pains and study to compound our colours 
and give luminousness to our works, He, by the 
mere craft of His will, illuminated His handiwork 
with infinite brightness in an instant ; and made 
the lovely landscape of the new-born earth flash 
into a thousand different hues with but one touch 
of the wondrous pencils of light as they fell upon 
the woods, the fields, the mountain-peaks, and the 
sky, for the first time of all. If then," said the 
artist, u there be art in divinity, at least there 
must be some touch of divinity in art. 

" The Divine attributes," the painter went 
on, "are goodness, wisdom and power, and the 
human exponents of these qualities in the world 
are the clergyman, the philosopher, aud the 
artist; but the artist transcends all. Art, for 
instance, must take precedence of science ; for 
what is all natural science but the explanation 
of God Almighty's art as seen in the works of 
creation ; even as all criticism is but the expound- 
ing of human art as displayed in the works of man's 
imagination ? Human wisdom comes from experi- 
ence, but art is intuitive, lying in the innate 
perception of the beautiful, and the inherent 
faculty to render it either pictorially, musically, 



PLEASURE HUNTING. 201 

or poetically, ; Again, without a sense of art 
there could be no worship ; for the feeling of wor- 
ship conies only from the admiration and the 
reverence that a sense of the mighty power mani- 
fested in all objects of creation naturally begets 
in the mind. There is indeed," he said, " a sponta- 
neous worshipfulness naturally upspringing from 
the love and appreciation of art ; for who could 
be conscious of standing in the august presence of 
a power infinitely superior to his own, without a 
feeling of veneration for the All-powerful over- 
shadowing and humbling his soul ?" 

" Did not the zealous old painters pray" — he 
ashed — "pray as few pray now-a-days, before 
they dared to try and hobble after the great cre- 
ative power ? and who but a man accustomed to 
be continually thinking of the Artist in all the 
works he looks upon — to have an ever-abiding 
sense of the prompter, as it were, behind the 
scenes — could contemplate nature with half the 
reverence in his eye and mind that a true and 
high artist really does ? To such a one a glorious 
picture is not a mere piece of prettily-coloured 
canvas, nor a noble statue only an elegant toy 
in stone. Xo !" the painter exclaimed, with all 
the enthusiasm of his ardent and reverent spirit ; 
"the exquisite counterpart of nature hanging 
against the wall is, to the artistic sense, radiant 
with all the glory of the counterpart of the divinity 
that created it; and the marble bust, animate with 
all the fine intelligence and power of the divine 
spirit that made the stony bosom heave with 
life. Even so the world of beauty itself, which, 
to the blear eyes of the vulgar, the prosaic, and 
ascetic, is but a prettiness, or utility, or a vanity 
at best, appears to the artist, who is ever thinking 
of the Artist in all he sees and admires, as a 
gorgeous, coloured, and jewelled veil, through 



202 YOUNG BENJAMIN FRANKLIN. 

which the unspeakable grandeur of the Godhead 
is everlastingly beaming with infinite love and 
grace upon mankind." 

Rational Animal. — No. 16. 

The musician, whom the boy saw soon after- 
wards, discoursed nearly to the same tune, though 
with some slight variation. To him there was a 
lovely melody for ever flowing through all crea- 
tion ; the very succession of the seasons — the 
passage from night to day — the revolution of the 
planets — the rush of comets — the stately proces- 
sion of the clouds — the mighty surging of the 
tides — the pulsing of the human heart — all this 
was but the latent music of the world. For to the 
finely attuned ear and mind it suggested a corre- 
sponding rhythm of melodious and stirring sounds, 
that seemed like the distant hum of the great 
angelic choir, heard in the soul ; even as one hears 
the murmuring of the waves in the shell after it 
has been cast out of its ocean-home. There was 
no joy, the musician told the youth, so pure, so 
entrancing, so transporting as that of music. It 
fell like an ethereal dew upon the fevered spirit 
of man, and flowed like the softest and subtlest 
balm into the wounds of the bruised heart. It 
was the manna of the mind — a kind of honeyed rain 
from heaven, sent down to sustain us in the wil- 
derness of life and trouble. li What would the 
voice of man be without its natural tones ?" the 
musician inquired. "Why, words," he answered, 
"were the mere black and white of speech; it 
was tone and expression that gave its true colour 
to language. Was there not an innate and special 
rhythm to each particular feeling — a different key- 
note to almost every different passion in our souls ? 
Fear shrieked in discord; whereas love always 



PLEASURE HUNTING. 203 

lisped in music. Then the universal harmonies of 
things that philosophers and poets spoke so much 
about — what was this but the light melting into 
melody as it fell on Memnori's head ? All science 
was but the music of reason — the harmonizing of 
different passages from the great opera which was 
for ever being performed about us ; while all art 
was but the attempt of a few fiddlers to " render " 
the grand organ-peal of the universe — to give ex- 
pression to some stray little bit of special beauty, 
that the spirit fancies it has caught up from the 
works of the Great Master. Everything was music, 
music everything. ' ' 

Little Ben was bewildered beyond utterance 
with what he heard. u Which was right?'' he 
kept wondering ; " which was right *?" But 
before he could give vent to anything beyond the 
crudest astonishment, the uncle had brought him 
to some fresh "rara avis" among men — some new 
version of life's whims and oddities. 

And when the boy had been taken to see tra- 
vellers, and philologists ; tulip -fanciers entomo- 
logists and meteorologists ; chess-players, and 
physiognomists (there were no phrenologists nor 
mesmerists in those days), old book collectors 
and statisticians, or mere fact and figure collec- 
tors ; amateur actors, amateur sailors, and amateur 
stage coachmen as well ; ay. and almost the whole 
army of your hobby-horse volunteers in existence, 
the tutor and his pupil at length returned home, 
fairly tired out with their excursions in quest of 
the pleasure-seekers of human life. 

' ; But uncle," said little Ben, for the hun- 
dredth time of asking, as they sat resting their 
outstretched limbs in front of the wood fire in the 
little back parlour of the candle-store ; t; of all the 
queer people we have seen, and the many queer 



204 YOUNG BENJAMIN FRANKLIN. 

tastes and fancies we have found them indulging 
in, which, do you really think now is right ?" 

"Well, lad," answered Uncle Ben, U I look 
upon them all, as I told you long ago, as a lot of 
"big boys, chasing one and the same butterfly. 
If they were so many puppets, Ben, with a wire 
up their backbone, and pulled by some invisible 
hand, they couldn't be made to play up greater 
antics, or be more assuredly set in motion by one 
and the same cause." 

"Yes, uncle, I know," replied the impatient 
youngster ; " but you haven't answered my ques- 
tion. Now, which of all the many different 
pursuits we have seen, is, in your opinion, the 
most rational ?" 

" Hah ! my little man," returned Uncle Ben, with 
a philosophic sigh, " there are so many different 
roads to happiness in this life, that, unless we 
have the ground we are to travel over clearly 
mapped out before our eyes, it is difficult to say 
off-hand which is the shortest cut, or even the 
cleanest or most agreeable way to it. Unfor- 
tunately, too, there is no sign-post set up at 
the point where the different cross-roads meet, to 
direct us along the right path, or to say, ' This 

LEADS TO MISERY ' — ' THIS IS THE ROAD TO RUIN ' 

' THIS IS THE NEAREST WAY TO SHAME ' — ' THIS IS THE 

highway to folly,' and so on. So that when 
we come to this juncture in our journey through 
life, and stand deliberating as to which of the 
many turnings we had better take, why, we may 
be led by an infinity of circumstances to strike 
into the wrong path, and find out, when it is too 
late to retrace our steps, that what we fancied at 
starting to be a perfect palace in the distance, 
surrounded by the most extensive pleasure- 
grounds, is merely the poor-house, or the county 
jail, or some great lunatic asylum after all." 



THE RIGHT ROAD. 205 

u But uncle," exclaimed the eager lad, deter- 
mined not to be put off, "you must have some 
opinion yourself on the matter. Which of all the 
persons we saw do you think, now, was going the 
right road as you call it ?" 

" Which do 2 think — was going — the right road, 
lad ?" echoed the old man, with the most tanta- 
lizing tediousness. u Is that what you want to 
know, Ben?" 

"Yes, uncle ! which do you say — which?" the 
boy inquired again, as he leant forward in his 
anxiety to catch the answer. 

" Well, then, let us see ! let as see !" was the 
sole reply. 



CHAPTEEXVIT. 

THE RIGHT ROAD. 



" Well, uncle," said little Benjamin, after a 
.slight pause, ' ' go on : which is the right road as 
you call it ?" 

" Ay, but wait awhile Ben ; wait awhile !" said 
the other, as he knit his brows, and nibbled away 
at his thumb-nail with all the vigour of a mouse at 
a cheese-paring, muttering to himself the while, 
" There's nothing like making an impression while 
the wax is warm." Then he suddenly looked up, 
half- vacantly, at his nephew, and inquired " What 
kind of a night is it, Ben ?" 

" Oh, quite fine and bright starlight, I declare," 
answered the boy as he thrust his head between 
the curtains of the little back-window. " But 
pray what has that got to do with the right road, 
uncle?" 

" Yes — nothing like making an impression while 
the wax is warm," he mumbled again to himself; 



206 YOUNG BENJAMIN FRANKLIN. 

and tlien asked aloud, " And which way's the 
wind, lad ?" 

" The wind, uncle !" echoed the youngster, 
more and more puzzled; "why it's as near as 
possible due south," he called out, as he went 
again and peeped "between the window curtains. 
" I can see by the smoke yonder coining out of 
old Mr. Brownwell's chimney. But what are you 
up to uncle, eh ?" 

" Southerly, is it !" was the reply, " so much the 
better — so much the better, for then it's sure to be 
warm. Give me my hat and spencer, Benjamin," 
he said, starting suddenly from his chair. 

" Why, you're never going out at this hour ?" 
exclaimed the godson, in utter bewilderment. 

" There, never mind, lad ! but do you go and 
get your top-coat, and come along with me :" the 
godfather went on, " there's no possibility of going 
over the matter here, with that shop-bell tinkling 
away every minute, and the people dodging con- 
tinually in and out," he kept mumbling half to 
himself, as he stood with his amis stretched out 
behind him, waiting mechanically for the boy to 
slip the sleeves of his spencer over them. And 
then, as he turned round suddenly, and found 
his nephew had never stirred from the spot, but 
was still staring at him in wonder as to whether he 
could really be serious in what he was doing, he 
cried out : " Why, you young rascal, I'm not going 
to carry you off to the prairies again, never fear ! 
You're a bit tired, I dare say, Ben, but we're not 
going far. So look alive ! or we shall have your 
father putting up the shutters before we start." 

Some half-hour afterwards the uncle and his 
nephew were seated on a solitary lump of rock 
that jutted just above the sands on the sea-shore, 
scarce a mile beyond the town of Boston. 



THE EIGHT EOAD. 207 

The night was almost as bright as day; and 
had it not been for the silvery rays of the full 
moon, which seemed to cover the earth with a 
sheet of snow, one might have fancied, from the 
luminousness and transparency of the air, that it 
was the cold blue twilight of an early summer's 
morning. 

The sky was frosted all over with " star-dust," 
and sparkled like the sea at night in the tropics 
with its million points of fire. Down the centre 
of the firmament streamed the broad phosphores- 
cent band of the "milky way;" with its "fire- 
mist " of stars, looking almost as fine and infinite 
to the naked eye as the minute particles that go 
to make up the bloom on a butterfly's wing ; and 
seeming as though the curtains of the heavens 
"were parted there, and one could just catch the 
dazzle of the countless multitude of lights about 
the Godhead's throne. On either side of this, the 
bright figures of the more marked constellations 
shone out in lustrous lines — solemn as the symbols 
traced by the Unseen Hand in strokes of fire upon 
the wall ; and here and there, some larger star or 
stray planet arrested the eye, as it was seen 
shining alone in the pale violet air — a little ball 
of white light ; bright as a glowworm in a hedge- 
row. Not a cloud was to be seen ; the moon, 
which had not long risen, hung a little above the 
horizon, like a big pearl upon some Indian 
prince's neck ; and poured from out her opal urn 
such a flood of virgin beams that the white lustre 
came streaming across the ocean to the shore in a 
narrow rippling rivulet of molten silver ! flowing 
as it were through the parted waters of the sea ; 
and as the billows fell languidly upon the beach, 
the very moonbeams seemed to curl over there, and 
then spread themselves out into a broad shallow 
sheet of splendour far along the sands. 



208 YOUNG BENJAMIN FRANKLIN. 

Tlie earth itself was almost as lovely as the sky 
and sea. Though all colour had faded from the 
world, and Nature looked sombre as a sister of 
charity in her sad-coloured garb — though the 
woods had no more tint in them than black clouds 
of smoke welling up out of the ground — though 
the roadways were white as snow-drifts with the 
moonlight — and the fields like plates of steel, 
with the cottages glistening in the beams as if 
they had been cut out of marble — still, what 
exquisite "value" did the neutral tones and half- 
dusk of the night give to the little specks of light 
that were seen shining, here and there, in the 
distance ; now alone from out the windows of 
some solitary homestead, and now thick as a 
swarm of fire-flies from amidst the haze of some 
far-off village ! 

The neighbouring town of Boston itself, with 
the moonlight drenching its endless ridges of 
roofs, so that they appeared to be positively wet 
with the beams ; and the dusky forms of the tall 
steeples and towers melthjg, spectral-like, into the 
cold gray background of the sky — was indeed a 
noble sight at such an hour. The million window- 
panes were like so many squares of burnished 
gold with the multitude of the lights in the houses; 
and these were reflected in the tide that washed 
the peninsular pedestal of the city, so that the 
water seemed ablaze with the long bright streaks 
of fire mirrored in it ; and there they kept flashing 
with every ripple of the waves, till they appeared, 
now like so many fiery snakes diving deep into 
the ocean, and now like a flight of rockets shooting 
downwards in long meteorlike trails. 

There was hardly a sound to be heard. The 
rippling of the waves upon the sands was as gentle 
as a summer-breeze rustling through a forest. 

The clatter of the workday world had ceased ; 




Uncle Ben points out the Right Road to Worldly Happiness.—.; 



THE RIGHT ROAD. 209 

the hum of the town was hushed; the country 
silent as a tomb. The only noises that came 
fitfully upon the ear were the occasional barking 
of some startled farm-dog far away in the country ; 
or the muffled throb and splash of some poor 
fisherman's oars at work in the offing; or else the 
bells of the many church clocks of the town tolling 
the hour, one after another, in a hundred different 
tones. 

" Now, my little man," said Uncle Benjamin, after 
he had sat for a while silent!}- contemplating the 
grandeur of the exquisite scene before him, "here 
at least we shall be secure from interruption ; and 
here, lapped in the very sublimity of creation, let 
us try and find out which is the right road to 
worldly happiness." 

The little fellow curled his arm about the old 
man's neck, and looked into his face, as much as to 
say he was ready and anxious for the lesson. 

" Well, then, Ben, of course you have never 
asked yourself how many different kinds of plea- 
sure there are of which human nature is suscep- 
tible," began the tutor. 

" No, that I haven't, I'm sure," was ths frank 
reply; "but, bless me, uncle, I should say, from 
the specimens we have seen, that there are as 
many different pleasures as there are men in the 
world ; for each person we visited seemed to find 
enjoyment in almost the very opposite pursuit to 
that of his neighbour." 

" Ay, my son, but those you saw," said Uncle 
Benjamin, "were each a type of a large class in 
life. I showed you, purposely, but one member 
of each different order of characters among man- 
kind. But had we, instead of picking our way 
through the town, gone regularly on from house 
to house, you would have found that there are 
many misers in society like the one we saw ; and 

r 



210 YOOTG BEHJAMIN FBAHKLIH. 

a whole multitude of drunkards differing but little 
from the individual drunkard we visited ; as well 
as a host of poets, and a large family of gluttons, 
philosophers, and fops ; besides innumerable sports- 
men, musicians, amateur-mechanics, artists, and 
antiquaries ; and that they have all, more or less, 
the same peculiarities and propensities as the 
types I introduced, you to. So that, though geo- 
graphers divide the several branches of the great 
human family into nations, according to the mere 
patch of earth they are located upon, there is, 
nevertheless, more difference of nature often to be 
found between African and African, or Spaniard 
and Spaniard — or even between Yorkshireman 
and Yorkshireman, than between miser and miser, 
or drunkard and drunkard." 

" How strange it would be then, uncle," re- 
marked the boy, smiling at his own idea, " if ail 
the misers were made to live together, and parted 
off into a separate nation ; as well as all the 
drunkards, and poets, and philosophers, and 
sportsmen, and others too. Then we should have 
the kingdom of Misers, and the empire of 
Drunkards, I suppose ; or, Hunksland, and Sotland, 
as they would be called perhaps — as England and 
Scotland were, you know, after the Angles and the 
Scots ;" and the boy laughed outright at the notion, 
as he said, "wouldn't it be droll, eh? and I'm 
sure it would be a much better arrangement than 
now, for then all of the same tastes and dis- 
positions would be gathered together, like one 
family in the world." 

"But you'll find out, my lad," rejoined the 
uncle, "before you have lived many years longer, 
that ' birds of a feather do flock together ,' ; as the 
saying goes ; your drunkards hob-a-nob with their 
brother drunkards in the tap-room ; gluttons frater- 
nize with gluttons at public dinners and feasts ; — 



THE EIGHT ROAD, 211 

fops with fops at evening parties and balls; 
scholars with scholars in colleges and learned 
societies ; sportsmen with sportsmen in the field 
and at betting places ; and philosophers with 
philosophers in scientific academies and institutes. 
The world is broken up into sects as much by 
the ' non-conforming ' of tastes as of religion, Ben, 
and each difference of creed is the same heresy to 
those who have a pet faith of their own. But we 
must keep to our point, lad," he added. " I asked 
you how many different kinds of pleasure human 
nature is susceptible of, and mind, I say ' kinds,' 
not species ; but classes, which include a large 
number of different varieties of pleasure within 
them." 

M I'm sure I can't say," the little fellow replied, 
with a shake of the head; " I can hardly under- 
stand the words you use, uncle." 

" Well, then, let me explain," continued the 
other. " Every state into which our mind can be 
thrown must be either a sensation, a thought, or 
an emotion ; hence it follows, that any pleasurable 
state of mind must be either a pleasure of the 
senses, a pleasure of the intellect, or a pleasure of 
the heart, so to speak, supposing the heart to be 
the organ of the emotions." 

" Oh ! I think I see what you mean now,uncle," 
returned the youth with considerable quickness, 
jumping as he did at once at his uncle's idea. 
wi You would say, I suppose, that all pleasures 
must belong to one of those three kinds of pleasure ; 
they must be either sensual pleasures, or intellect 
tual pleasures — or — or — what's the name for the 
other?" 

"Moral pleasures," said the old man, " though 
it is but a sorry title at best ; still, as it is the 
term usually applied, we will not stop to spli- 
hairs, or quibble, like lawyers, about words." 

p2 



212 YOUNG BENJAMIN FRANKLIN. 

" So then all the different pleasures that we 
found the persons pursuing in our journey 
through the town," the lad went on saying, half to 
himself, delighted now that he had got hold of 
something like a clue to the mystery, "were either 
sensual, intellectual, or — or moral ones. Let me 
see ! let me see !" he continued, musing, 
"whether I can make it out by myself. The 
drunkard's was a — a — sensual pleasure, of course 
« — and so was the epicure's ; and the poet's was an 
intellectual one. Yes, of course, it was, and so was 
the philosopher's too ; and the miser's was — was — 
what would you call the pleasure the miser found 
in his money, eh, uncle ? It can't be intellectual ; 
I should think it's sensual, isn't it ?" 

" No, lad ; the love of money belongs to the class 
of moral pleasures," was the answer. 

"Why there's nothing moral about that, I'm 
sure," returned the pupil, with more frankness 
than deference to his teacher. 

" There is no more true morality in money- 
grubbing, Ben," added the old man, " than there 
is profound intellect in collecting bits of old 
pavement and old tiles ; and yet it is avarice that 
makes the one pleasure congenial to the miser, 
even as knowledge gives a zest to the other with 
the antiquary." 

" But avarice is greediness after money, isn't it, 
uncle ? and if the greediness of the epicure is 
sensual, why shouldn't the miser's gluttony for 
the guineas be called the same ?" argued the boy, 
who was not at all pleased to hear the passion of 
the old hunks dignified into a moral pursuit. 

"Why, my lad," answered Uncle Benjamin, 
" simply because it is not the senses that enjoy the 
money, as the palate does the food or drink, but 
the sordid heart that finds delight in it. Granted 
the greed of the ononis no more enlightened or 



THE RIGHT ROAD. 213 

refined than that of the other, for there are de- 
grading moral pleasures as well as degrading- 
sensual ones, Ben ; but the delights of human na- 
ture are simply sensual, intellectual, or moral, 
I say again, according as they are enjoyed either 
by the senses, the mind, or the heart of man." 

" Oh, I understand now," responded the pupil. 
" But, uncle," he cried, the moment afterwards, 
" what's the use of these grand names and nice dis- 
tinctions ? they don't seem to me to give a chap 
any real knowledge of the nature of the pleasures 
themselves after all." 

" Well said, my son, well said !" the old man 
replied, as he pressed the pet boy to his bosom. 
"Tm glad to see you are not to be put off with 
mere big words, Ben. But it so happens in this 
case that the grand terms are not simply hard 
names invented to confound the vulgar; but they 
mark distinctions which enable us to study a 
number of different things at once, to group toge- 
ther a large variety of human pleasures, and thus 
find out what is common to all of that same kind, 
instead of our having to criticise each isolated plea- 
sure successively. So that when we have once 
parcelled out all the delights of mankind into the 
delights either of the senses, intellect, or heart, 
we can ascertain the peculiar attributes of each 
distinct class of delight merely by attending to 
the peculiar characteristics of sensation, thought, 
and emotion in all mankind." 

u Ah, I see !" exclaimed the boy, thoughtfully ; 
u but isn't it very difficult to find out what 
are these peculiar characteristics, as you call 
them ?" 

" The knowledge can be gained only by pro- 
found reflection and long attention to the matter," 
was the answer. " However, let us begin at once 
with the sensual pleasures, and see what worldly 



214 YOUNG BENJAMIN FRANKLIN. 

wisdom we can gather from even a cursory review 
of them, my little man." 

The boy again placed himself in a convenient 
position for listening, as he said "Yes, uncle, go 
on !" 

The Pleasures of the Senses, 

u In the first place, then," commenced the god- 
father, " I should tell you that a sensation, accord- 
ing to the strict meaning of the term, always 
requires an external cause to give rise to it ; whereas 
a thought has always an internal origin, being 
excited in the mind, in every case, by some pre- 
ceding mental state. For instance, this rock pro- 
duces in me a sensation of roughness as I draw 
my hand along it, and this makes me think of the 
texture of other rocks, and then inwardly com- 
paring the one with my remembrance of the other 
impressions, I judge what quality of stone it is by 
the mere touch. The external body thus excites 
the sensation in my mind, and this inward sensa- 
tion produces the thought of other bodies like it, 
and that thought again induces the comparison 
and ultimate judgment. The first impression had 
an outward origin, the ideas which followed it 
were all excited within me, the one mental state 
giving rise to the other." 

" I understand," said the attentive listener. " A 
sensation " — and he went over the distinction so 
as to impress it the better on his memory — 
" comes from something outside of us; a thought 
is excited by something within." 

"Well then, my boy," continued the- other, 
" this being understood, of course it follows 
that we can have as many different sensations as 
we have different means of communicating with 
the outward world, or as there are, so to speak, 



THE EIGHT ROAD. 215 

different doors and inlets to our mind. Now, how 
manv different organs of sensation have we, lad ? 
you know thai, Ben, I suppose ?" 

" Oh yes, uncle, we have five senses, I know," 
replied the youth. "' Let me see, what are they ? 
Seeing " (and he told them off, one after the other, 
on his fingers as he spoke), "hearing, tasting, 
smelling, and feeling ; yes, that's the five, all told." 

"True, my man," added the uncle, "but a per- 
son may have many other sensations than such as 
come in through the organs of sight, sound, smell, 
taste, and touch. These are the fixe principal 
gates to the brain, certainly, but beyond them 
there is the general sense of heat and. cold, as 
well as the several appetites of the body ; all 
of which have an external origin as much as any 
other sensations of which we are susceptible. The 
gastric juice, for example, from the action of 
which on the stomach the feeling of hunger is 
said to proceed, is as much external to the mind 
as the soft, warm breeze which I feel now as it 
sweeps past my cheek." 

" Go on," said the boy, as the old man paused 
for a minute to see whether the little fellow could 
follow him. 

" And besides these, Ben," the godfather pro- 
ceeded, "there is that indefinite sensation which 
comes from the natural and genial action of every 
function throughout the human frame when in a 
state of absolute health, or the sense of con- 
valescence, as it is termed ; and which has no par- 
ticular organ to develop it, but arises from the fit 
operation of all the different parts of the system 
at once. Then again, lad, there is the sense we 
have of physical exercise, or that peculiar feel- 
ing which arises in the mind on the contraction 
of our muscles and play of our limbs ; as well as 
the sense of effort that we experience when we en- 



216 YOUNG BENJAMIN FRANKLIN. 

deavour to exert our power in any great degree. 
And further, there is the sense of ease or satisfac- 
tion that we feel either after resting from fatigue, 
or on the allaying of any appetite, or the relief 
of any bodily pain. Lastly, there is the sense 
of stimulus or inordinate excitement, such as 
we experience when the particular functions of 
our body are performed with unusual vigour, 
as upon the quickening of the circulation, or 
upon being thrown into that peculiar vivid state 
called mental emotion, and which seems to 
affect the body almost as much as the mind. The 
same sense of stimulus also manifests itself in that 
peculiar impression of increased liveliness of sys- 
tem which is usually called ' animal spirits.' And 
here, so far as I know, Ben," concluded Uncle 
Benjamin, " ends the catalogue of the distinct sen- 
sations of which mankind is susceptible." 

" Very good ! very good !" cried the little fel- 
low ; " and now let me see whether I can remember 
them all. First come the five principal sensa- 
tions of seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting, and 
feeling ; and then — let me see, how did you go 
on? Oh yes ! then there is the sensation of heat 
and cold, and of the bodily appetites ; and after 
that you mentioned the sensation with the long 
name, you know — the sensation of — of perfect 
con — con — convalescence — yes, that's it; and — 
and — what's after that? — don't you tell me, uncle. 
Oh, ay ! I 've got it — of exercise and of effort ; and 
then there is the sensation of ease or satisfaction ; 
and lastly, that of stimulus or — or — whatever was 
it you called it ? — some hard word or another, I 
know it was." 

" Or inordinate excitement," prompted the 
teacher. 

" Oh yes ; inordinate excitement, so it was," 
cried the boy (clapping his hands as the remem- 



THE RIGHT EOAD. 217 

brance of the words started back into his brain). 
t; Do you think I went over those pretty well, 
uncle ?" 

"Excellently, my little man; and I am the 
more pleased, because the ease with which you 
recalled my words shows the intentness with 
which you must have listened to them," returned 
!7ncle Benjamin, as he again fondled the little 
fellow, and told him, more by caresses than flat- 
tery, how delighted he was with his long pa- 
tience. 

OF SENSUOUS PLEASURE ITSELF. 

' ; Well, Master Ben," the old man resumed, " as 
we know the different sensations of which human 
nature is susceptible, we are now in a position to 
begin studying the pleasures connected with 
them ; for each organ of sense, I should tell you, 
boy, is not only capable of giving us some pecu- 
liar perception like those of light, heat, sound, 
odour, flavour, and substance, but it is also 
endowed with a fundamental capacity for convey- 
ing pain and pleasure, delight and disgust, in 
connection with such perceptions ; and thus the 
light and heat, &c, which we perceive may be 
either painful or pleasant, agreeable or disagree- 
able to our feelings. Xow it is with these addi- 
tional or superimposed qualities that we have to 
deal, lad; rather than with the mere abstract 
perceptions or impressions themselves." 

" I see," murmured little Ben. 

u But first let me point out to you, my son," 
the old man went on, " the bounty and the grace 
of this addition or extra endowment to our senses. 
The simple perception of light and colour only, 
for instance, or even of sound alone, would, it is 
obvious, have been quite sufficient for all the 



218 YOUNG BENJAMIN FRANKLIN. 

purposes of mere sight and hearing ; but the adding 
of the aesthetic qualities, as they are called, the 
making of light and colour beautiful, and sound 
melodious to us, is surely an act of high and spe- 
cial benevolence — a touch of gratuitous and lavish 
kindness which, as it adds nothing to the utilities 
of life, but is a source of some of the purest and 
most generous of all earthly happiness, is a signal 
evidence of the goodness of God to us. Again, 
even the institution of pain itself, which has so 
puzzled the controversialists as to ' the origin of 
evil,' is, when physiologically considered, merely 
another motive to action in man. You know I 
told you before, Ben, nothing can move without a 
cause, and that there is a reason for every one of 
the actions among human beings and the lower ani- 
mals, which are continually going on in the world. 
With mankind, as you have seen, the chief stimulus 
to action is the pursuit of pleasure ; it is the sense 
of delight to come that generally leads men to act 
in this way or that. But while the love of pleasure 
draws us almost insensibly along by the silken 
cord of our innate desires towards that which is 
agreeable to us, our inherent aversion from pain 
makes us instinctively shun that which is noxious 
to us. Like the two poles of a magnet, the one 
attracts and the other repels, but both act to- 
wards the same end : the repellent force not only 
drives the body away, but it turns it at the same 
time towards the attractive one. And as the op- 
posite poles of the magnet, when it is bent into the 
form of a horse-shoe, so that they may both operate 
simultaneously, act and react on each other, and 
have thus more than double the power of either 
force singly, so, lad, with pain and pleasure ; they 
are but two causes instead of one to produce the 
same effect ; a double motive power to induce us 
to seek the good and avoid the evils of life. Then 



THE RIGHT ROAD. 219 

surely if it were benevolence to make ns delight 
in goodness, as the means of drawing ns by the 
insensible attraction of our own instincts towards 
that which is fit and proper for ns ; so was it even 
still greater benevolence to give us a natural 
loathing for what is hurtful to us, and thus to 
create in us an involuntary aversion from the 
several ills the flesh is heir to. Tie wed in this 
light, lad, evil is the very counterpart of goodness 
itself, and pain the twin-sister to pleasure." 

" So it is," exclaimed the little fellow ; " though 
I must say it does seem at first sight like as if pain, 
misery, and want had been created by an evil 
spirit rather than a good one — doesn't it, uncle ?" 

THE PLEASURES OF THE FIVE PRINCIPAL SENSES. ' 

61 And now, Ben, primed with this knowledge 
as to the fundamental use of pain and pleasure in 
the world, we will proceed forthwith to the con- 
sideration of the pleasures of the senses," — the 
godfather went on. "Well, then, my boy, as 
each sense has been made susceptible of a certain 
form of pleasure and delight, it follows, of course, 
that there must be as many different forms of sen- 
sual pleasures as there are distinct sensations in 
mankind." 

" Ah, I begin to see now why you wanted to 
make me acquainted with the different sensations 
themselves first," ejaculated little Ben. 

u There are, of course," added Uncle Benjamin, 
"the pleasures of the five principal senses to 
begin with. Above all. there are the pleasures 
of the eye : and these mostly consist in the natural 
charms of lustre and splendour, bright colours 
and graceful forms ; and hence the delight of all 
nations in pomp, show, and dazzle, as well as 
ffiandiness and gewsraws. Hence comes the love 



220 YOUNG BENJAMIN FRANKLIN. 

of the precious metals, as being the more pleasing 
to the sight ; and the love of those pretty crystals 
called jewels, as being the brightest-hued and most 
brilliant little lumps of matter in the world about 
us ; hence, too, the love of fine robes, grand halls, 
gilt carriages, and gay liveries among the rich, 
as well as among monarchs and lord-mayors, and 
of tinsel and frippery even among chimney-sweeps ; 
ay, and of bright beads and peacocks' feathers 
among barbarous nations and savages. Nor is 
this all : the natural delight that even the most 
educated and refined feel in the contemplation of 
nature when decked in all the glory of summer 
vegetation ; in beholding — the goldeu corn — the 
purple clover — the green meadows — the jewelled 
orchards — the bright blue sky — the snow-white 
clouds — the crystal waters- -the sparkling foun- 
tains — the many coloured flowers, and the rich 
lustre of the sunlight as well as the blanched splen- 
dour of the moonlight, and fiery fretwork of the 
stars — all is due principally to that wondrous palate 
of the eye, which makes such perceptions more or 
less pleasurable to the sense of vision in all man- 
kind." 

" Go on, uncle, I like to hear this," exclaimed 
the boy, delighted with the crowd of pleasant 
associations now called up in his mind. 

"Then, lad," he continued, " there are the 
pleasures of the ear, such as the warbling of the 
birds — the sweet plaint of the cuckoo — the rich 
notes of the nightingale, and the dulcet rapture of 
the lark ; the sound of woman's gentle and kindly 
voice — the laughter of infants — the murmur of the 
brooks — the hum of busy insect life — the buzz of 
the waterfall — the drone of the far-off sea — the 
chiming of the church-bells — the ' soughing ' of 
the wind, and even the negative delight which 
the same sense finds, in the stillness of evening, 



THE RIGHT ROAD. 221 

the quietude of the sabbath, and the solemn 
silence of the forest." 

The boy nodded as much as to say, " proceed !" 

''Next we have the pleasures of the palate, 
Ben," said the uncle ; " and these are made up of 
the sweets and fruits of the earth, and the choice 
flavour of spices and ' sweet herbs,' as well as the 
peculiar and grateful sapid qualities of the dif- 
ferent kinds of meat, roots, and grain that con- 
stitute our food. Besides these, too, there is the 
delicious freshness of a draught of cool and spark- 
ling spring water — the softness of milk — the rich- 
ness of wine, and the pungency of spirits. Nor 
should we here forget the strange perverted taste 
for tobacco, which, from being loathsome even to 
nausea at first, becomes, if long persisted in, not 
only pleasant, but generates an absolute craving, 
as hunger does in the system. 

" Further," he added, after a slight pause, " there 
are the pleasures of the sense of smell ; and these 
are not less manifold than the others. To this 
sense man owes a great part of his delight in 
flowers and fruits, and also his taste for the cloy- 
ing luxury of artificial perfumes — the fine aroma 
of spices — the rich fragrance of incense ; while 
among the daintier charms of the same organ may 
be included the delicate natural odour of early 
morning — of the new-turned earth — of new-mown 
hay — of burning weeds — of the nutty smell of the 
woods, and the fresh redolence of the sea ; more- 
over, even the negative delights of pure air and 
cleanliness spring partly from the like faculty." 

" Again, my boy, there are the charms peculiar 
to the sense of touch or feeling, that sense which 
is confined not alone to the finger-ends, but dif- 
fused over the whole skin. Among these may be 
ranked the delight we find in softness and smooth- 
ness, as well as in elasticity or yieldingness. It 



222 YOUNG BENJAMIN FKANKLIN. 

is this sense which makes man feel pleasure in fine 
linen and velvety textures — in easy chairs™ soft 
couches, and beds of down ; and it is the peculiar, 
fresh, and glibsome feel of the skin, in a state of 
perfect cleanliness that constitutes one of the main 
inducements to personal ablution. Further, it is 
doubtlessly in the delight that the hand experiences 
in the palpabilities of finely rounded and gently 
swelling forms, that lies the very foundation of 
our notions of beauty in lines, and figures." 

" Now that's all the five senses, uncle," re- 
marked the boy, as his godfather came to a pause. 
" But then, you know, there's the sense of heat and 
cold, and the sensations of the different appetites, 
and the sense of perfect what d'ye call it — perfect 
con — con — I never can remember that name ;" and 
but for this little hitch in his memory, the lad 
would assuredly have run through the whole 
catalogue once more. 

" Ay, boy ! but one thing at a time, Ben," cried 
out the uncle, who was getting anxious to bring 
this part of the lesson to a close. " The pleasures 
derivable from the sense of heat and cold are 
chiefly such as are afforded by warm clothing in 
winter, and cool, light garments in summer. It 
is this sense that makes a fine warm spring day 
so intensely delightful to us all; this which 
renders the sea-side, with its fresh invigorating 
breezes, so pleasant in summer, as well as the 
cool shady lanes of the country, and the exquisite 
umbrage and subdued light of the forest, so agree- 
able to every one at the same season. In the 
winter, on the other hand, the same sense makes us 
find pleasure in the shelter of our house and the 
cosiness of our own fireside ; and when the keen 
and stinging east wind is heard whistling without, 
or when the earth is white as an infant's pall with 



THE RIGHT ROAD. 223 

shoeless wanderers with nothing but their rent 
rags of clothes to cover them, and no roof to shelter 
their heads, why then, like the hypocrites of old, lad, 
we thank God we ' are not as one of these ;' and 
then our natural love of warmth makes us find a 
special blessing in the comforts of our own home, 
and the bright substitute for the sunshine that is 
glowing in the centre of our own hearth." 



THE PLEASURES OF HEALTH. 

" And now for the pleasures of the bodily ap- 
petites !" exclaimed little Ben as soon as his god- 
father had finished with the other. 

" Nay, child, all in good time," was the answer ; 
" they must stand over for awhile, till we come to 
the pleasures we experience from a sense of ease 
or satisfaction. The next subject is the pleasures 
of health, or those which arise from our sense of 
p erfe ? t c onval e sc enc e . " 

" Ah, that's the word I wanted !" shouted Ben, 
intensely pleased to get hold of it once more. 
44 Perfect convalescence — perfect convalescence ■ 
I won't forget it in a hurry again, I warrant." 

•Tell, lad," said Uncle Benjamin, "the 
pleasures of health are of so indefinite and sub- 
dued a character, that it is only when they are 
brought out by the contrast of a long illness, that 
we are fully sensible of the great natural delight 
there is in a state of convalescence. Then, as the 
blood begins to tingle again softly in the veins, 
and to set every nerve sparkling as it were with the 
returning circulation, while the whole skin becomes 
alive with the faint tickling of its revived action — 
then as the warm sunshine is felt to sink into 
the frame like a honeyed balm, and to pervade the 
body as if it were in an absolute bath of light, and 
the fresh breeze seems positively to play and fondle 



224 YOUNG BENJAMIN FRAKKLIN, 

with the cheeks, softly as a woman's hand, as it 
sweeps past them, and to breathe the very breath 
of life into the frame with the refreshing fanning 
of every gust — then, and then only, are we tho- 
roughly conscious of the fine sensuous delight 
that health affords us. It is the same principle of 
contrast, again, which gives the sense of health 
such charms in the memories of the old — ay, and 
even in their imaginations, too — when they be- 
hold the stout limbs, the plump and rosy cheeks, 
the pinky and smooth skin of hearty children ; and 
see the little things run and frisk with all the 
sportiveness and springiness of lambs ; and hear 
them laugh with the fine wild joy of utter care- 
lessness ; full of life even to overflowing, and 
gushing with spirits ; and with every fibre of 
their frame glowing and quickened with the 
delightful enlivenment of thorough bodily sanity. 
Ah, then what would not the aged and decrepit 
give for one hour's enjoyment of this same sense 
of perfect health again !" 

THE PLEASURES OF EXERCISE. 

" Now are you going to do the pleasures of the 
appetites, uncle ?" inquired the boy, who seemed 
to be still anxious that his teacher should keep 
to the order which he himself had laid down. 

" No lad," the other made answer ; " the next 
sensual pleasure I shall touch upon is the natural 
delight of physical exercise — though in the slight 
glance I have just given at the enjoyment 
children find in their sports and gambols, I have 
somewhat forestalled the subject. The delight of 
exercise (apart from the charms of external nature 
and that enjoyment of change of air, which always 
serve to increase, more or less, the pleasure we find 
in walking or riding), the delight of exercise, I 



THE RIGHT ROAD. 225 

say, seems to arise principally from the ' working 
off' of that muscular irritability which is called 
' fidgetiness,' when it becomes excessive in the 
system. The blood, as it travels through the 
body, tends to irritate every fibre of the flesh and 
nerves, and this irritation gives the muscles a 
natural tendency to contract, in the same manner as 
if they were excited with the mere point of a pin ; 
and hence the allaying of the uneasiness occasioned 
by the muscular irritability, becomes a source of 
no slight pleasure to mankind. Again, in the act 
of exercise the whole system becomes quickened, 
and every function stimulated, while the health 
is improved as well as the spirits enlivened. So 
that even were there no special delight of its own 
connected with the sense of exercise, the mere 
pleasures of increased health and excitement 
would be sufficient to make it agreeable to us. 
But the delight that youths find in what are called 
athletic sports and games — the fine manly pas- 
times of cricket, rowing, running, leaping, climb- 
ing, skating, riding, and even the more effeminate 
amusement of dancing — all owe the greater part of 
their charms to the natural love of exercise in 
human nature. Again, the enjoyment of travelling 
(though of course the pleasure of seeing strange 
countries and customs enters largely into that 
kind of gratification) borrows not a few of its 
delights from the same sense : and even that love 
of wandering, which is termed ' vagabondage ' 
(in those who cannot afford to pay hotel bills) 
may be referred to the same cause. Indeed, it 
admits of a great question, too, whether that high 
principle of freedom, which is called ' the love of 
liberty,' is not part of that natural vagabond 
spirit in man, which, springing from an instinctive 
delight in exercise, makes us averse from all 
restraint, and ready to burst through any impedi- 



226 YOUNG BEaJA^IIa FSAKKIJN* 

ment that may be opposed to the free use of our 
limbs or the natural exercise of our will." 



THE PLEASURES OF THE APPETITES. 

tf And now, I suppose, you're going to touch 
upon the pleasures of the appetites — ain't you, 
uncle ?" again inquired the youth, after another 
pause ; for, boy-like, he was not a little taken with 
the subject. 

"Yes, my boy, they come next," the godfather 
returned; "but the pleasures of the appetites — - 
now that we have gone over those of the palate r 
which gives to eating and drinking the main part 
of their positive gratification — are mostly of a purely 
negative character. That is to say, the pleasure that 
essentially belongs to them consists chiefly in the 
removal of that pain or uneasiness, and consequent 
craving, which is the characteristic feeling of the 
appetite itself; and in the substitution of a state of 
perfect ease and satisfaction in its stead. As I 
said before, Ben, if hunger had been made a plea- 
sure, man would have sat still and starved with 
delight ; and as the pain of hunger, or want, is 
one of the chief ills in the world, we have here 
another marked instance as to the benevolent 
origin of what is called £ evil.' But though our 
appetites, lad, have been made pains — or at least 
uneasinesses — and that merely with the view of 
exciting us to seek the things necessary to appease 
them, the act of appeasing them has assuredly 
been rendered a special delight to us ; for not only 
has taste been superadded to the appetite, so as to 
make the food agreeable to the palate, but the feel- 
ing of satisfaction, ease, and contentment — which 
follows in the mind immediately the craving is 
stopped — has been rendered one of the most tran- 
quil and yet enjoyable states of which our nature 



THE RIGHT ROAD. 227 

is susceptible. Indeed, the delight that all men 
find in a sense of ease and satisfaction is perhaps one 
of the strongest ' cues to action ' in human nature ; 
for not only does this pleasurable state of negation 
from pain or uneasiness immediately succeed in 
the mind, on the allaying of the craving of the 
bodily appetite ; but it follows every other state of 
bodily or mental disquietude that man can suffer, 
and makes the sense of relief from physical torture 
as intense a pleasure as any in life. The sense of 
effort, for instance, I have before told you is 
always irksome, and hence the uneasiness of "what 
is called hard labour ; and this is what all the 
world is endeavouring to escape from, and ulti- 
mately settle down into a state of ease and comfort 
in their old age. No man in existence likes work, 
though there is a cant abroad that industry is 
pleasant ; for work is essentially what is irksome, 
whereas, directly the work becomes pleasant it is 
1 play ' or ' amusement.' But man must work, as I 
said, to live ; and all prefer even the irksomeness of 
toil to the agony of starving ; while most men 
put up with the uneasiness of their present labour 
and strife, for the purpose of acquiring the means 
of future ease and rest.. But effort is not only 
irksome, lad, even when exerted in a slight degree, 
but it is absolutely painful when prolonged to a 
great extent: and it is always fatiguing when long 
sustained, and ultimately is overpowering. Now it 
is this sense of fatigue which invariably follows any 
long-continued series of efforts, that makes the ease 
of rest and repose a source of intense delight to 
the weary. You, yourself, Ben, remember how 
you enjoyed your bed after that long pull at the 
sculls, when we were becalmed in the offing yonder; 
and every one who has felt the fatigue of a very 
long walk, and known what it is to have every 
muscle positively sore and tender with the pro- 



228 YOUNG BENJAMIN FRANKLIN. 

tracted exertion — the limbs stiff and cramped, 
and the joints seeming to grate against the bones 
with every bend — knows also that there is perhaps 
no luxury in life like rest. To many a labourer, 
lad, who is forced to be working hard all the week, 
and to whom even the sleep of the se'night is 
insufficient to take the crick out of his back, and 
aches out of his arms, the Sabbath is often a 
sabbath of mere bed ; or, at least, a large slice of 
the enjoyment of the blessed day of rest, with such 
people, consists in a sleep in the fields. But not 
only does the natural delight ,in ease," he went 
on, " show itself in this way among the poor and 
hard-working portion of society, but the same 
principle is also strongly developed in the rich and 
indolent members of every community. It is this 
love of ease that makes your fine folk delight in car- 
riages, so that they may be dragged along through 
the air rather than be put to the exertion of walk- 
ing ; and it is the same feeling which makes them 
delight in a retinue of servants, to save them the 
trouble of doing the least thing for themselves. 
Again, the nice charm there is in what are called 
the ' comforts ' of life, derives its pleasure from the 
same source ; for such comforts are but the means 
of removing certain little household uneasinesses ; 
and the very delights of home itself may be referred 
to this same love of ease and quietude. To every 
English heart, home and comfort are the main en- 
joyments of life ; and yet it is but the love of ease 
and quietude that makes the peace and coziness 
of our own hearth so acceptable after the day's 
labours, the day's cares, and the day's hubbub. 
And finally, it is this very love of ease, rest, and 
tranquillity, that makes the tired pilgrim through 
life (when the limbs are aching with their long 
journey, tho back is crooked with the heavy 
load of years, and the ear is deaf with the noise 



THE RIGHT ROAD. 229 

and strife of the world) sigh for the long rest and 
sweet repose of heaven itself — the peaceful home 
of the spirit — the blessed comfort of the soul/' 

THE PLEASURES OF PHYSICAL EXCITEMENT. 

"And now," said the little fellow, " you've 
got to do the pleasures that come from what d'ye 
call it? — that other long word you used." 

" Inordinate excitement, Ben," added the old 
man. "Yes, my boy, and these will not take us 
long to specify ; for I have already, while speaking 
of the delights of health and exercise, pointed out 
to you. how large a share of those pleasures are 
due to the increased stimulus given by them to 
the circulation, as well as to every function of the 
body. There is, of course, a strong physical 
enjoyment in feeling the blood go dancing through 
the veins, and in having a fine glow of new life, as 
it were, diffused throughout the entire frame ; to be 
conscious of a new vigour being infused into every 
fibre, and a fresh energy thrown into every limb ; 
to find the animal spirits suddenly rise and gladden 
our nature, like a burst of sunshine upon the earth : 
to see the mist of the megrims gradually melt away 
from before the eyes ; to have bright and happy 
thoughts come bubbling up, one after another, into 
the brain, and feel the heart flutter with the 
very thrill of the invigorated system. Every one 
delights in the gentle excitement of cheerfulness, 
as much as they dislike the wretched depression 
of melancholy — or ' low spirits,' as it is called. 
And it is the sensual charm, which is to be found in 
a state of increased bodily excitement, that leads 
your drunkard and your opium-eater to fly to 
potions and drugs as a means of producing it ; 
whilst the gourmand, whose stomach and palate 
have grown dull and dead from long indulgence 
in the highly-seasoned food of epicurism, resorts 



230 YOUXG BENJAMIN FRANKLIN. 

to the strong stimulus of sauces, spices, and shal- 
lots, cayenne, curries, and ' devils ' as the means 
of stinging his over-worked gustatory nerves into 
something like liveliness. It is the more remark- 
able, too, that it is only with weak and diseased 
appetites and natures that such stimuli or inor- 
dinate excitements are required. The drunkard, 
whose stomach is jaded and spent with the 
continued goading of his ' drams/ must have a 
' relish ' — some salt, savoury snack — before he can 
bring himself to touch any solid food ; the sick 
person, recovering from a long illness, is always 
more or less squeamish in his taste, and requires 
the little that he does take to be cooked in some 
peculiarly dainty manner ; in order that the rare 
delicacy of the dish may ' tempt ' him, and so serve 
as a gentle stimulus to his flagging appetite. The 
same delight in excitement, indeed, prevails in 
every one of the senses. The eye loves the extra 
vivid impressions produced by the contrast of 
opposite colours — the juxtaposition of black and 
white, red and green, for example ; and even the 
natural antipathy we have from darkness, and the 
desire to revel in a ' blaze of light, 5 have their 
origin in the same tendency to delight in unusual 
vividness. To this principle, too, maybe referred 
the charm we find in the solemn grandeur of the 
thunder-storm: in the instantaneous flash that 
lights up the whole heavens and the earth at once, 
and then suddenly leaves it in pitchy darkness ; 
in the unnatural stillness that reigns throughout 
all nature before the storm, to be broken at last by 
the wild clatter of the thunder-burst, that seems 
like the roar and tremble of an earthquake in the 
heavens themselves. These are not only the 
brightest and loudest effects in the world, but 
contrast serves to render them even brighter and 
louder than they naturally are. Again, lad, in 



THE RIGHT ROAD. ' 231 

the sports and games of youth, it is the excitement 
of the play that lends as great gratification to the 
amusement, as even the exercise itself." 

THE PLEASURE OF HABIT. 

" And now you've done, uncle, haven't you?' 
said the boy as the old gentleman came to a pause, 

" Xot quite, my lad," the other made answer, 
" for there is still the sensual pleasure of habit to 
be mentioned in order to complete the catalogue. 
This pleasure, again, like those of health, exercise, 
ease, and excitement, has no particular organ to 
which it can be referred ; but is rather a delight 
that admits of being connected with any or all of 
the more special sensations themselves. Of the 
strange pleasures which habit has the power ot 
developing in us — of its power to transform what 
is naturally irksome and even painful into delights, 
and to change aversions into propensities, I have 
before spoken. I have pointed out to you that all 
which is required to work this marvellous change 
is long-continued repetition, and that, too, at fre- 
quent and regular intervals ; but the change once 
wrought, the pleasure we derive from the object 
or practice to which we have become habituated 
is, perhaps, as great as any of our natural enjoy- 
ments. For instance, there is no doubt that the 
taste, and maybe even the smell of tobacco, is 
innately repulsive ; and yet, let any one persevere 
in the use of it — let him continue either smoking, 
chewing, or snuffing it, and after a time habit is 
sure to set in, and transform the instinctive 
loathing into a cultivated longing — the natural 
abomination into an artificial delicacy. It is the 
same with the eating of opium and the drinking 
of neat spirits. With the muscular actions of the 
body, again, as well as the objects of the senses, 



232 YOUNG BENJAMIN FRANKLIN. 

You have already been told how the irksomeness 
of labour, Ben, can be converted into a comparative 
pleasure by habit ; and it now only remains for me 
to draw your attention, lad, to some few other 
pleasures of the same kind. The pleasure of 
exercise, we all know, is so much increased by 
the habit of walking daily, that perhaps the chief 
punishment in imprisonment lies in the mental 
and bodily irritation which is felt when indulgence 
in the habit is prevented. Again, as I said before, 
there is pleasure even in whittling or paring sticks 
with a sharp knife, as you see the people con- 
tinually doing in this part of the world ; and, 
indeed, the simple habit in children of biting the 
nails produces so strong a desire to continue the 
practice, that their hands have occasionally to be 
muffled, or their arms strapped behind, to prevent 
them indulging in the practice. Further, there is 
the well-known story of the barrister, who always 
kept twiddling a piece of string when he was 
pleading, and who „could be most eloquent while 
habitually engaged in unravelling the twine ; but 
who couldn't get a word out, if some wicked wag 
only stole the string before he began his address 
to the jury. Nor is this all : so strong a hold 
does habit lay upon the mind, that the national 
customs of a country are often as much revered as 
even the national religion itself ; and not a few 
revolutions have been caused by the attempts of 
rulers to alter the habits and ceremonies of a 
people, There, now I have done, Master Ben," 
added the uncle, " and given you, I believe, a full 
list of the purely physical pleasures that our 
nature is capable of enjoying." 

THE RESULT : THE BUSINESS OF LIFE. 

" Thank you, uncle," said the lad, as he rose 
from the rock on which he had been seated; " and 



THE RTGHT^ROAD. 233 

now, I suppose, we can go ;" for, to tell the truth, 
though little Ben was a good listener for his years, 
he had almost had enough lecturing for one 
sitting. 

" Go, boy!" echoed the elder Benjamin, with 
pretended disdain : " why, what did we come for, 
you rogue ? We came, Master Ben, to put you on 
the right road ; but as yet we haven't advanced a 
step. TTe are only staring up at the sign-post 
still, and haven't even decided whether it will be 
better to go the way the senses would lead us, or 
whether we shall follow the path the intellect 
points out, or take the road the heart would 
counsel us to pursue." 

'•Oh, ay! no more we have, uncle. Do you 
know, I had forgotten all about that" answered 
the frank lad, who was too little skilled in the 
subtleties of dialectics to be able to keep the point 
of the argument always in view. "Well, then, 
I suppose now that you've explained all about the 
sensual pleasures, you're going to show me next 
why they're not so good as the intellectual, or 
moral ones." 

" I never yet gave you to understand, lad, that 
they were not as good, in their way, as the others," 
was the gentle reproof. " ^Vhen kept within due 
bounds, and held to their proper objects, there is 
assuredly no harm in the pleasures of the senses." 

" Yes, but what are those due bounds, as you 
call them, uncle?" inquired the youngster. 

" The bounds of nature, boy ; the bounds of the 
fitness of things," the teacher replied. " See here, 
Ben, and mark well what I say. The three main 
objects of life are these : business, amusements, 
and duties. It is the chief business of life to get 
food and clothing for the body ; to provide 
ourselves and those who belong to us with shelter, 
and, if we can. with the comforts of existence : as 



234 YOUNG BENJAMIN FRANKLIN. 

well as to lay by such a store as shall insure us 
the means of ease, if not affluence, in our old age. 
The main business of life then, you perceive, lad, 
is merely to minister to the wants and delights of 
our senses ; or, in other words, not only to prevent 
the pains and uneasinesses of the flesh, but to 
obtain some small share of the animal pleasures of 
existence. The addition of the feelings of delight 
and disgust to the mere perceptive faculties of the 
senses, Ben, I have before shown you, is a signal 
evidence of God's goodness to his creatures. Food 
is necessary only to reinvigorate the body, and 
allay the pains of appetite. No other quality was 
required for the mere purposes of continued animal 
existence ; but the Almighty has made food agree- 
able to the palate also. Light and colour were 
all that was wanted for vision, but He has made 
them beautiful as well ; sound alone would have 
been sufficient for hearing, but He has superadded 
melody and harmony ; and it is only an ascetic 
bigot, therefore, who is insensible to the bounty 
of God's benevolence in the world, that believes 
he is leading a righteous life in shunning all the 
graceful charms of sentient nature." 

The boy stared with astonishment to hear his 
half-Puritan godfather give vent to such senti- 
ments, and inquired, " Then why, uncle, were 
the epicure and the drunkard such offensive 
characters ?" 

" Because, my lad, they ignored the stern 
business of life, and gave every thought of their 
mind, every affection of their heart, to mere 
animal pleasure. That form of pleasure which, 
kept within its own natural bounds, is, remember, 
an after-gro.ee, they made a primary pursuit of; 
the sensual delights, which have been superadded 
as a graceful reward after the Lard business of life 
has been done, they made the whole and sole 



THE EIGHT EOAD. 235 

business of their lives ; in other words they strove, 
like dunces, to get the reward while they shirked 
the task," was the response. " The rudest form 
of animal life, Ben," he went on, " the last link 
in the long chain of sentient existence, is a polype, 
without eyes, limbs, heart, nerves, or indeed any 
organ of sense, and hardly of motion ; a mere 
animated stomach ; a living thing that you can 
turn inside out, and which still goes on performing 
its one function of eating and drinking as com- 
placently as ever ; an animate creature that is 
all belly and nothing else. The epicure and 
the drunkard, lad, are human polypes ; the ' gas- 
tropods ' of mankind, whose belly is the only organ 
that moves them ; and stirred by which, like slugs, 
they go crawling and slavering along through 
the brief term of human existence. The business 
of life, my son, is to get the means of living ; but 
the means of living are wanted not merely to 
tickle the palate, but to enable us to satisfy all the 
cravings, requirements, and aspirations — all the 
duties, affections, and yearnings of our nature. 
The grand object, Ben, is to make the business of 
life a pleasure, and not the pleasures of life a 
business." 

" I think I understand what you mean by the 
business of life now ; and see why the drunkard 
and the epicure are not worthy people." 

" There is but one other point now," said the 
old man, "and then I have reallv done, my 
child." 

" And what is that, Uncle Ben ?" the boy asked, 
as he grew a little fidgety. 

"Well, lad," the godfather went on, "you re- 
member I pointed out to you at the beginning of 
the subject, that our sensations all come from 
without?" 

" Oh, yes ! I recollect you 



236 YOUNG BENJAMIN FRANKLIN. 

always had an external cause, and thoughts an 
internal one — those were your words, unky dear," 
exclaimed the little fellow, roused by the pride of 
having an opportunity of showing how attentive 
he had been. 

" They were, Ben ; and such impressions, coming 
from without, of course do not depend upon our- 
selves," added the uncle. " "We must go and hunt 
in the world for such objects as we desire to act 
pleasantly upon our senses. But these objects are 
often to be procured only by extreme labour on 
our parts, or at great cost, in order to induce 
others to part with them for our benefit. Hence 
sensual pleasures are always the most costly of 
all pleasures. The delights of the palate, for 
instance, are found chiefly in the more expensive 
viands, fruits and wines ; as well as the rare deli- 
cacies which are either brought from the farthest 
corners of the earth, or forced into maturity by 
great care and trouble, at unusual seasons of the 
year. For the luxurious gratification of the eye, 
again, we need the show of superb services of 
plate — the dear finery of jewels, and silks and 
satins, velvet and lace — the magnificence of stately 
halls, elegant furniture, and splendid decorations 
— the prettiness of gay gardens, and the noble 
grandeur of parks. And it is the same with every 
other sense appertaining to human nature ; for 
the highly-prized objects of delight to each of the 
physical faculties are sure to be highly priced 
also. Indeed, the only means of sensual enjoy- 
ment that we have really within our own power, 
and which does not require some external object 
for its gratification, is that of exercise ; for the 
objects upon which exercise expends itself are our 
own limbs and the muscles of our own body. 
Hence the games and sports which make this 
physical indulgence so agreeable to men as well 



THE EIGHT ROAD. 237 

as youth, are sources of harmless and healthful 
pleasure, always within our grasp ; and hence the 
very exercise of labour itself, when quickened 
by the excitement of will or purpose, or trans- 
formed into a propensity by long habit — of labour , 
which is not only necessary to our independence, 
and even continued existence in the world — is a 
faculty that lies literally at our fingers' ends ; and 
which may be made to contribute at once to our 
well-being and to our happiness. Finally, I should 
impress upon you, my boy, that with the undue 
indulgence in any mere physical delight, there is 
always some peculiar bodily evil connected. 
Over-indulgence of the palate brings gout, dys- 
pepsia, apoplexy, and the utter ruin of bodily 
health ; over-drinking causes delirium tremens, 
softening of the brain, and the soddening, even to 
fatuity, of the mind. Over-work, on the other 
hand, produces premature old age and decay; and 
over-ease, in its turn, begets indolence, corpu- 
lency, and positive helplessness. These, my lad, 
are the worldly punishments instituted by the 
Great Judge over all — the brands which the 
Almighty prints on the brows of the fools and 
human beasts of the world, and that are intended 
to whisper ' Beware,' in the ears of the more wise 
and prudent." 

"Well then," said the little fellow, "I think 
sensual pleasures are but sorry pleasures after all, 
uncle." 

" They are, as I said, lad, designed to render 
the business of life agreeable in the end ; and hence 
were never intended to be made the primary pur- 
suit of man's existence ; and those who wrest 
them from their true purpose, and seek to trans- 
form them into amusements, must suffer for their 
folly. If men have no want of food, and will yet 
eat, for the mere pleasure of eating some savoury 



238 YOUXG BENJAMIN FItANKLIN. 

dish, they not only lack the natural relish of food, 
but they break a natural commandment, which 
ordained that hunger should stir men to seek food, 
and that the pleasure of eating it should be the 
reward of getting it. And the breach of this 
natural commandment brings, sooner or later, its 
own peculiar natural punishment — bodily enfee- 
blement instead of strength and vigour — injury 
rather than well-being — suffering and disease in 
the place of happiness and health." 

The words were barely uttered, when Uncle 
Benjamin started as he cried, " Hush ! what 
o'clock's that?" and the sound of the big bell of 
the state-house clock was heard booming, in the 
silence of the night, resonantly across the water. 

"One! two! three! four!" counted the old 
man, following each stroke as it burst upon the 
air. 

" It's nine, I'm sure, uncle !" interjected little 
Ben. 

"Five! six! seven!" continued the other. 

a It must be nine," added the boy, " for we 
can't have been here more than two hours ; and it 
wasn't quite seven, you know, when we started." 

" Eight ! nine !" Uncle Benjamin kept count- 
ing as the other talked, and then, holding up his 
ringer, as he reckoned the ninth stroke, he waited 
for a moment or two, and at last shouted out, as 
he rose hastily from his seat, " Ten ! as I'm a 
living sinner. Come along, Ben ! come along ! 
we shall have them all in bed before we get 
home, I declare!" 



239 



CHAPTEE XVIII. 

THE NEXT TURNING. 

Thf. following night the same couple were seated 
on the same lump of rock, looking at the same 
bright moon and stars, and engaged in solving the 
same subtle problem — " Which is the right road 
through life ?" 

" Kow, then, Master Benjamin," began the good- 
natured old tutor, as freshly as if he were never 
tired of counselling his little godson as to how to 
live a righteous and sober life ; " we have seen 
where one of the roads leads to ; we have learnt 
that if we follow the path of mere sensual plea- 
sure, we must expect to pay heavy tolls and taxes 
by the way, and shall come to only disease and 
anguish at the end. So let us take a peep down 
the next turning, and see what looms in the dis- 
tance there." 

u The next turning, as you call it, uncle, looks 
like a nice, quiet, shady lane to me," remarked the 
pupil, only too pleased to carry out the figure. 
iC It's the path of intellectual pleasure, isn't it?" 

" It is, my son," the other answered ; " and as 
the main object of the business of life is to stay 
the cravings and relieve the uneasinesses, as well 
as to contribute to the natural delights of the 
senses : so with the amusements of life, intel- 
lectual pleasure is, or should be, more directly 
connected. The physical word for amusement, 
Ben, is recreation ; and a fine term it is, as ex- 
pressing that re-enlivenment and re-invigoration 



240 YOUNG BENJAMIN FRANKLIN. 

of the jaded powers of body and mind which come 
from mental diversion. Enlightened amusement 
really mental refreshment — a cooling draught from 
a shady spring, that sobers and revives the sonl 
after the heat of the work-day world, far more 
than any of the fiery stimulants which the senses 
delight in. I told you, lad, you remember, when 
treating of the sense of effort, that it was always 
irksome, occasionally painful, and if long con- 
tinued, fatiguing, and ultimately overpowering, 
for us to make any severe exertion. Now the 
natural means of removing fatigue is by rest ; for 
the sense of weariness, which oppresses the limbs 
after protracted labour, is merely the Almighty's 
voice whispering, 'Hold ! enough !' and warning 
us not to overtax the powers He has conferred upon 
us ; and when this weariness sets in, the craving 
for rest, which He has implanted in us, tells us 
that mere repose alone is sufficient for the recruit- 
ment of the spent animal strength and spirits. 
But the change that rest produces in the frame 
passively, amusement, or mere diversion of the 
mind from the laborious pursuits, brings about 
actively. The action of diversion recreates and re- 
invigorates, as much as positive inaction or repose ; 
and hence amusement, after the day's business 
and labour have been done, is as healthful as rest 
itself; ay, and as necessary too, for the restoration 
of that elasticity of energy — that spring of body 
and mind — which is requisite for the doing of the 
business and labour of to-morrow," 

Little Ben was delighted to learn the philosophy 
of amusement, for, boy-like, he was quite suffi- 
ciently in love with recreation to be glad to hear 
that there was not only an excuse, but really a 
reason for indulging in the pleasant pastimes of 
life; so he chimed in, "Yes, uncle, I've often 
heard you tell father that 8 all work and no play 



THE NEXT TURNING. 241 

makes Jack a dull boy ;' and now I know the truth 
of the saying." 

4 'Ah, lad! but always bear in mind the con- 
verse of the proverb," was the rejoinder, " ' that 
all play and no work makes Jack a beggar-boy/ " 

THE PLEASURES OF THE INTELLECT. 

" "Well, Ben, with this little preface," the 
uncle resumed — " we now pass on to consider the 
several intellectual pleasures themselves. To each 
intellectual faculty of our nature, then," he began, 
"there is of course some special associate mental 
delight attached ; in the same manner as there is 
some peculiar kind of animal pleasure connected 
with the various organs of sense ; and I might 
proceed with this part of our subject by explain- 
ing to you, in due order, all the particular pleasures 
of the memory — the pleasures of the imagination 
— the pleasures of the judgment — the pleasures of 
reason — the pleasures of art — the pleasures of 
abstraction, and so on. But this mode of procedure 
would convey to you, comparatively speaking, but 
little knowledge as to the maiu springs or sources of 
such pleasures ; and I want to give you a deeper 
insight into your own nature, my child, than 
comes of mere classification or orderly arrange- 
ment. I want to let you see that the general 
capacities for enjoyment in man, are really the 
same in the intellect as in the senses themselves ; 
and that the only difference is, that with the 
various forms of mental delight, the pleasure comes 
in through the operation of the thoughts ; whilst 
in the various kinds of animal delight, the grati- 
fication enters through the action of some 
organ of sensation. Kow, lad, let me hear whe- 
ther you can enumerate the different kinds of 
sensuous pleasure of which human nature is sus- 
ceptible ; over and beyond those which belong to 

R 



242 YOUNG BENJAMIN FRANKLIN. 

what are called the five senses, and also that of 
heat and cold ; for these we have done with." 

Young Ben put his head to one side, and rubbed 
away at his scalp, as hard as a cat does occasion- 
ally at its ear, as he exclaimed, "Let me see! 
there's the pleasure of the sense of perfect con- 
valescence ; I remember that, because of that 
plaguy hard word. And then there's another one, 
with a long-winded title, too, but he comes at the 
last, I know ;" the boy went on talking away, as he 
tried to recall the sensations in the order his 
uncle had gone over them. " Oh yes ! then there 
is the pleasure of exercise, and the pleasure of 
ease and satisfaction ; and then comes Mr. Crack- 
jaw, and he's called the pleasure of — of — don't you 
tell me now — of — inordinate excitement. Yes, 
that's it !" he added, as the thought came out with 
a pop, like the cork from a bottle of soda-water. 
" Oh ! but wait a minute," he cried, as he saw his 
uncle still looking at him, as much as to say he 
had forgotten something — •" and then there's the 
pleasure of habit as well." 

"Bravo, little man! bravo!" cheered the old 
boy, for really the uncle was as pleased with the 
feat as the little fellow himself. "And now, 
omitting the pleasures of health, I want to show 
you, Ben, that we find the same delight in mental 
exercise, as in the exercise of our bodies ; the 
same pleasure in the satisfaction of our minds, 
and freedom from any state of mental uneasiness, 
as in the allaying of any bodily craving or unplea- 
santness ; the same gratification in vivid thoughts 
and perceptions, as in extra-lively sensations and 
bodily stimulants ; and the same enjoyment in the 
indulgence in particular habits of thinking, as well 
as feeling." 

"How strange!" murmured the lad; "but 1 
can't see how you'll ever make it all out though." 



THE 2TEXT TUHXIXG. 243 

11 The delights of exercise, satisfaction, inordi- 
nate vividness, and habit," continued the god- 
father, " are as strongly marked in the mind as in 
the body ; and as the corresponding physical im- 
pressions appear to come in through no special 
organ of sense, but to be impressions that admit 
of being associated with all or any of our physical 
faculties ; so the capacity for these kinds of plea- 
sure would seem to be general capacities that are 
capable of being united to the operations of the 
mind as well as that of the senses ; and to be the 
means of enjoyment, as it were, underlying all 
our bodily and mental powers at one and the same 
time. 



THE PLEASURES OF MEXTAL EXERCISE. 

Let us begin with the pleasures of mental 
exercise." 

The lad nestled up close to his godfather, and 
curling the old man's arms about his neck, ar- 
ranged himself in a comfortable posture for list- 
ening. 

" The principle of the ' association of ideas, 5 as 
it is called," commenced the tutor — Ci that prin- 
ciple by which thought is linked with thought in 
the mind, and which causes conception after con- 
ception, and remembrance after remembrance to 
keep on for ever sweeping through the brain (like 
the endless procession of clouds across the sky, 
or the interminable succession of waves over the 
sea) is the principal means by which the mind 
is moved from object to object, and made to appear, 
even to the individual himself, to pass through a, 
series of images and recollections, rather than the 
images and recollections seeming to flit succes- 
sively through it. It is this movement of the mind, 
this transition from one state to another, which 

r2 



244 YOUNG BENJAMIN FRANKLIN. 

corresponds with that gradual change of place 
and play of limb which is termed exercise in the 
body ; and as we are conscious of a continued 
action going on within our physical system every 
time we move our muscles (apart from the mere 
sensations of the flesh), so are we sensible of the 
same kind of action perpetually occurring within 
us, during the process of mental exercise. Indeed, 
as our limbs move, whether voluntarily or in- 
stinctively, only in answer to some preceding 
mental state, it is probably nothing more than the 
succession of these different mental states — the 
continued acts of volition or series of instinctive 
impulses felt in the mind — that impresses us with 
the sense of bodily exercise itself. 

" Well, lad," Uncle Benjamin went on after a 
brief pause, " having now settled that the sense of 
exercise is one and the same feeling, whether the 
action be in the body or mind, let us pass on to 
the enumeration of the mental pleasures which 
proceed from it. That there is a natural charm 
in the mere exercise of the mind — in the continued 
gradual transition from one mental state to another 
— is shown in the delight that is generally felt in 
indulging in those kinds of ideal panoramas ; those 
long trains of flitting fancies, that pass half-pic- 
tured before the ' mind's eye,' even in our waking 
moments, and which are termed ' day-dreams/ or 
4 reveries,' or ' wool-gathering.' Again, the plea- 
sures of contemplation and meditation— of ' brown 
studies,' as they're termed — are due to the same 
principle ; and so is the delight that some find in 
planning and inventing, and even in building 
what are called ' castles in the air.' Indeed, any 
mental process that excites thought after thought 
readily and steadily within us, produces (as the 
ideas keep sweeping through the mind) a kind of 
mellifluence as it were in the brain, that is essen- 



THE NEXT TUENING. 245 

tially agreeable to our nature. Again, the plea- 
sures of conversing, discoursing, and reading, may 
be all referred to the like cause ; for, apart from 
any special charm there may be in the different ideas 
thus introduced into the mind, there is a delight 
in the mere mental occupation and exercise that 
such acts afford us. Further, it is in the sugges- 
tivsness of certain subjects and ideas, as well as of 
certain objects in nature, and consequently in the 
exercise they afford to the mind, that a great part 
of natural and artistic beauty inheres. It is also 
on account of this suggestive property, that 
keepsakes, relics, heir-looms, portraits, and me- 
mentoes generally, make up the most highly- 
prized portion of every person's treasure ; serving, 
as they do, to revive or recall a long train of happy 
associations in connection with some beloved object 
— and that with a vividness and force that mere 
memory, without some such suggestors, could not 
possibly attain. For the same reason the favourite 
old haunts of former days, or the birthplaces or 
residences of the illustrious dead, and the ruins of 
ancient countries, castles, or abbeys, are objects of 
more or less beauty in the eyes of every one ; and 
they are so principally for their power of suggesting 
to us the thoughts of all the glory of the times 
connected with them. Again, many of our mental 
pastimes are sources of pleasure only as affording 
exercise, or acting as springs of suggestion to the 
mind. This is the case especially with the light 
amusement of riddles, and those tantalizing charms 
called 4 puzzles.' Moreover, many forms of wit — 
the wit of inuendoes and inferences, for instance — 
derive their delight simply from this principle of 
mental exercise, i. e., by leaving the mind to suggest 
the thought intended to be conveyed. Thus, in 
the old joke, we are told that a townsman said to a 
countryman, who was leaning listlessly over a 



%K) YOUXG EEXJAMIX FRAXKLIN. 

gate, that he looked as if he couldn't say ' Boh to a 
goose;' whereupon the chawbacon shouted 'Boh' 
at the other in reply. Kow, in this 'lively sally,' 
as it is called, it is obvious that the liveliness lies 
not alone in the readiness of the retort, but in the 
sly way in which it suggests to us that the townsman 
is one of the silly old birds that are sometimes 
caught by chaff. So too in the anecdote — " 

"Yes, uncle, that's right," interposed little Ben, 
who was still chuckling over the relish of the last 
jest, and all agog with delight at the prospect of 
another anecdote. " Go on; isn't it prime, that's 
all!" 

" In the anecdote, I say, lad, where a would-be 
witty officer is said to have asked a Eoman Catholic 
priest, why the papist clergymen were like don- 
keys, and to have answered when the priest 
6 gave up ' the riddle, ' because they all had crosses 
on their backs ;' whereupon the sly old papist, 
who was determined not to be outdone, demanded 
in his turn, whether the soldier could tell what 
was the difference between a military officer and a 
jackass ; and on the other shaking his head, and say- 
ing he ' couldn't see it,' the priest added simply, 
'No more can I!' — in this anecdote, I repeat, we 
have another illustration of the same kind of sug- 
gestive wit : namely, in the sly inference of the 
priest that he couldn't see any difference between 
the two creatures." 

" Oh, I take it now !" exclaimed the lad, thump- 
ing the air with his fist as his godfather threw in the 
explanation. " The priest was a sly rogue of a fel- 
low, wasn't he, uncle ?" the boy added, while he 
rolled about, and went into such convulsions of 
positive horse laughter, that the chuckle sounded 
very much like a neigh. 

" Ay, Ben, and the delight you find in such sly 
roguery, shows you the pleasure there is in suggest- 



THE NEXT TUhXKsG. 241 

ing or inferring, rather than saving what we have 
to say ; and thus leaving it to the mind to take up 
the sense by some act or exercise of its own. In 
irony, moreover, the very opposite is said from what 
is meant to be understood, and the true sense im- 
plied only by the tone and manner of saying it : as 
when I call yon 'a young rogue ' and ' a little rascal' 
by way of endearment, Ben" (and as the old man 
littered the words, he shook the pet boy playfully 
by the ear). " In poetry also, the like principle of 
suggestion is often made to act as a stimulus to the 
imagination, and to give by such means a high 
beauty to the art. Milton, for instance, in speaking 
of death, says very finely — 

" ' And on what seemed a head lie wore a crown.'* 

" Indeed, a hundred such examples of the beauty 
of the suggestive principle in art might be given. j 

* The same beauty of the suggestive principle in picto- 
rial art is shown in shrouding with the hands the features of 
figures in extreme grief : while in musical art, Btethcven's 
pastoral symphony, and Gliick's overture to ' Iphigenia,' 
and Mendelssohn's ' Midsummer Xight's Dream,' are illus- 
trious instances of the suggestivity of the works of the 
highest composers. 

t The three most suggestive poems, perhaps, in the 
English language are Wordsworth's ' We are seven,' Cole- 
ridge's ' Ancient Mariner,' and Edgar Poe's ' Eaven ;' and 
they may he said to take precedence as to beauty in the 
crder in which they are here set down. The little un- 
adorned gem of Wordsworth is assuredly the finest thing of 
the kind ever penned. The opening prelude, as to the great 
mystery of death to a little child, and then the exquisitely- 
innocent and touching manner in which the wee thing 
numbers the dead brother as one of the family still living, and 
the sweet, tender, and yet profound grace of the recurring 
burxlen " We are seven," is such a masterly opening-up of 
the highest supernatural speculation, in connection with the 
simplest and prettiest little bit of nature conceivable, that 
the mind after reading the verses oscillates between the 
tender and innocent rustic beauty of the child, and the 



248 YOUNG BENJAMIN FRANKLIN. 

So that there can be no doubt, Ben, that exercise of 
the mind is as grateful as that of the body ; and 



mystic shadowy sublimity of death, rapt in a profound day- 
dream of delight and wonder. How different, on the other 
hand, and yet how"; grand, is the weird curse-like tone of 
Coleridge's preternatural ballad ! It wants the gentle 
beauty of Wordsworth's little morsel to charm us, but it has 
at the same time an almost Shakspearian power about it to 
awe us. Coleridge carries the terror and grandeur of nature 
to the very verge of the imagination. He takes the mind, as 
it were, to the far end of the earth ?nd ocean — to the edge 
of the great precipice, and gives us just a peep of what lies 
beyond ; he lets us look down, so to speak, into the dizzy well 
of infinite space. But Wordsworth lifts us above all natural 
things. The spirit flies with him away out of space alto- 
gether, and is lost in the lovely dream-land of the immaterial 
world to come. We are set thinking of the angels, and 
listening to angel music, by the innocent words of one who 
seems like a little earth-angel herself, Edgar Poe's poem, 
on the contrary, derives its force from its overcasting the 
mind with a totally different feeling. There is a fine 
haunted sense left upon the soul after reading it. We have 
an oppression of fatalism, such as will come upon us (despite 
all our philosophy) after reading about death-fetches, 
omens, forebodings, and ugly dreams that seem to have been 
fulfilled. Nevertheless, despite the fine suggestions induced 
by the American poet, the poem itself is very thin and 
feeble after Coleridge's noble imaginative work, and does 
not admit of being compared for a moment with Words- 
worth's graceful cherub strain. I have heard great musi- 
cians (such as my old friend and teacher, John Barnett) say, 
that the peculiar charm of Beethoven's Pastoral Symphony 
is its wonderful suggestivity also ; that it lulls the finely- 
attuned musical mind into a pastoral reverie, as it were ; 
carrying it away, and lapping it in the very bosom of nature 
itself — now in the fields, now in the woods, and now by the 
brook side — and yet lighting it up softly with that reverent 
tone which the contemplation of Nature in her quietude, or 
even in her grandeur, always induces. 

Mr. Dickens has ofteD recourse to the suggestive form of 
wit, or making a part stand for — or rather convey a sense 
of — the whole, to produce some of his kapjnest effects. Sam 
Weller's well-kuown description of the inmates of the White 
Hart Inn in the Borough, by the boots he had to clean, 



THE NEXT TURNING. 249 

that whatever serves to stir the thoughts, and give 
play to the faculties within us, tends to gladden 



affords us as graphic a picture of the persons staying in the 
tavern as an elaborate painting of the characters themselves. 
"There's a pair of Hessians in 13," said he, in answer to an 
inquiry as to what people they had in the house ; " there's 
two pair of halves in the commercial ; there's these here 
painted tops in the snuggery inside the bar, and five more 
tops in the coffee-room, besides a shoe as belongs to the wooden 
leg in Xo. 6 ; and a pair of Wellingtons, a good deal worn, 
together with a pair of lady's shoes in Xo. 5." 

Again, the Shepherd with his " Wanities," and Sam's in- 
quiry as to which " partickler wanity he liked the flavour 
on best," is another happy illustration of the intellectual 
charm that lies in the suggestive process of wit or humour. 

" ' Wotfs your usual tap ?' asked Sam — of the red-nosed 
gentleman. 

"'Oh, my dear young friend,' replied Mr. Stiggins, 'all 
taps is vanities.' 

" ' Well,' said Sam, ' I des-say they may be, sir ; but wich 
is your partickler wanity. Yich wanity do you like the 
flavour on best, sir?' 

" ' Oh, my dear young friend,' replied Mr. Stiggins, ' I de- 
spise them all. If,' said Mr. Stiggins, ' if there is any one 
of them less odious than another, it is the liquor called nun — 
warm, my dear young friend, with three lumps of sugar to 
the tumbler.' " — Pickwick Papers, p. 376. 

Further, the wooden leg alluded to by Mrs. Gamp, is another 
fine graphic use of the same figure. "As to husbands," 
says the monthly nurse, " there's a wooden leg gone like- 
wise home to its last account, which for constancy of walk- 
ing into wine vaults, and never coming out again 'till fetched 
by force, was quite as weak as flesh, if not weaker." 

There is good, strong, humorous painting in the above ex- 
amples,though perhaps the touches are those of the ten-pound 
brush of the scene painter, rather than the delicate Shake- 
spearian strokes — the fine sharp lines of the true artist. Never- 
theless it is preposterous for a class of critics to pretend 
that the author of ' Pickwick,' ' David Copperfield,' and 
' Martin Chuzzlewit,' has no claim to serious consideration as 
a writer of fiction. The man who has created Sam Weller, 
Old Weller, Mrs. Gamp, Squeers, Pecksniff, Skimpole, and a 
host of other beings — that are as real to every reader 
throughout the country as their own friends and acquaint- 



250 YOUNG BEXJAMIX FRAXIZLIX. 

and inspirit us, as much as the movement of our 
limbs themselves. To the delight of mere mental 
exercise, then, may also be referred the charm that 
all find in mere change or variety. This love of 
change, indeed, is so marked a feature in human 
nature, that it is perhaps the most active of all 
principles within us. It is this which in the long 
succession of ever shifting scenery, characters 
and circumstances constitutes the great enjoyment 
of travelling ; this which makes the revolutions of 
the seasons, the passage from night to day, the 
ever- varying aspect of nature throughout every 
minute indeed of the same day, give such lively 
beauty to the external world. What an exquisite 



ances, and, indeed, in many cases better, and more intimately 
known, even than one's own relatives — is surely worthy of all 
acknowledgment as the Shakspeare of caricaturists. Let 
the reader mentally contrast the Nurse in 'Romeo and 
Juliet ' with Mrs. Gamp— old Weller with Falstaff — his son 
Sam with the fool in ' Lear ' — or Pecksniff with Malvolio — 
and he will understand why the distinction is drawn. If 
Mr. Dickens had been but wise enough to eschew the 
fatally-facile trick of sentiment ; if he had never written 
the profound rubbish of ' The Chimes,' nor the fatuous 
drivel of the ' Cricket on the Hearth,' nor the Adelphi 
rhodomontade of the ' Tale of Two Cities,' et id genus, he 
would beyond doubt have been as great a literary genius, 
after his kind — as fine a painter of the broadly marked 
characteristics of human life and out of the way places — 
as England has seen for centuries. He. however, has too 
strong a dash of the " real-domestic-drama " blood in his 
veins to allow himself to do himself even common justice. 
What is true and good in his nature, he must for ever be 
marring by affecting what is false and fustian in dramatic 
art. If he had only left the " Terry and Yates " prepara- 
tory school, and finished his education at the Shakspearian 
University, assuredly he might have taken honours ^ as a 
" double first." One always feels inclined to say to the indis- 
criminate admirers of such a man, what Eousseau told the 
friends who were lauding the " collected edition " of his works 
to the skies: "Ha! they should see the books he hadn't 
written." 



THE xext turxixg. 251 

cli arm, for instance, is there in the contemplation 
of the continued flitting of the clouds and the 
moving shadows upon the earth and water ; the 
"bright bursts of sunshine, and the sudden over- 
shadowing of the land ; the endless trooping of the 
waves, on and on towards the shore, and the 
everlasting curling and dash of the billows, one 
after another, upon the beach ; the capricious shift- 
ing of the swallow's flight, forked and swift as 
lightning ; the ceaseless whirl of the windmill 
sails, with their long shadows, coursing each other, 
upon the sunny greensward below !" 

" Go on, uncle, go on, I like this very much," 
interposed the youth, growing pleased himself with 
the rapid change of thought. 

"The continued pulsing of the water-wheel," 
resumed the old man, * ; with the white foam of the 
mill-sluice for ever tearing along, like a drifting 
snow-wreath in the dark shade of the overhanging 
trees ; the headlong little brook, with the water 
scrambling along its rugged bed, and curling like 
liquid glass about the edges of the opposing rocks 
and stones ; the waterfall, for ever descending in 
long pellucid lines of iridescent light, and sheets 
of the thinnest and purest crystal, and pounding 
the pool beneath into a mass of snow ; the fountain, 
weaving the water-threads into forms of the most 
exquisite beauty, and curves of the softest grace, as 
it showers its million sparkling jewels into the 
air, and on to the ground ; the rich ripe corn-field 
undulating in the breeze, as if it were a lake of red 
gold ; the farm cart, with its high-piled load of 
new-mown hay, surging and toppling as the team 
goes jingling along, rattling the bells upon their 
collars ; the mist at early morn gradually rising 
from the earth, like the lifting of an angel veil ; 
and the fitful crimson glare of the blacksmith's 
forge, flashing up, with every different heave of 



& 



252 YOUNG BENJAMIN FRANKLIN. 

the bellows, in the dusk of a winter's evening — all 
these, and a thousand others, derive their natural 
charms from that principle which makes change 
or variety, — the change of life and action, — so 
grateful to the minds of all. Indeed, the mere 
tedium, Ben, that invariably accompanies anything 
bordering on monotony ; the overpowering and in- 
sufferable weariness of one unvarying state of mind, 
when long protracted ; of one and the same object 
ever before the senses ; of one eternal note contin- 
ually sounded in the ear, or of one everlasting idea 
or subject presented to the imagination : as well as 
the innate antipathy we have from what is called 
prosiness, or what is ' boring ' to us, or even ap- 
pears ' slow ' — all this is sufficient to assure us that 
variation is not only a delight, but a positive craving 
of our intellectual nature. It is the intuitive know- 
ledge that artists have of the charm afforded by 
mere change, and the tedium induced by monotony, 
that makes painters love to ' break up ' long straight 
lines and large masses of colour in their pictures, 
and to find picturesqueness in the tumble-down 
and weather-stained old cottages of the peasantry, 
as well as the shaggy coat of the jackass, and the 
jagged lines of rocks and ruins. So again, in the 
plays of Shakspeare, Ben, the more passionate 
and beautiful speeches and scenes are broken up 
into a hundred fragments of different feelings ; and 
thus they have not only a wonderful truth to nature 
(for strong emotion is ever fitful and discursive), 
but display intense art, in that fine dramatic play 
and sparkle of the passions which is derived from 
the principle of transition or rapid change.* Ah, 

* The illustrations to which Uncle Benjamin more particu- 
larly alludes are the soliloquy beginning — " Oh, that this 
too, too solid flesh would melt," (where one feeling is sel- 
dom sustained for more than five consecutive lines ; the 
entire speech being full of disjointed utterances and abrupt 



THE NEXT TURNING. 253 

when I was a boy, Ben, I would much rather have 
seen the mummers act ' Hamlet ' or ' The Mer- 
liant of Venice ' over at Northampton, than have 
had a plum-cake any day. Further, my boy, in 
the tricks and transformations of conjurors, and 
even in the pantomimes of the mummers, it is the 
curious changes produced that render such exhi- 
bitions so delightful to youth ; whilst in works of 
fiction we are charmed by the rapid succession of 
incident and adventure, and the variety of cha- 
racter and scenes presented to the mind. In con- 
versation too, it is the exchange of opinion and 
sentiment, the crossfire of the different ideas and 
different views expressed by the different charac- 
ters assembled, the occasionally lively repartee in 
answer to some grave remarks, that serve to make 
social intercourse one of the special delights of 
human existence.* Such are a few of the pleasures 



digressions, as well as parenthetical bursts of some passing 
passion) and the first scene of the third act of ' The Mer- 
chant of Venice,' where Tubal brings Shylock news of his 
runaway daughter, and also of Antonio's loss at sea, and in 
which the Jew is tossed about in a tempest of conflicting 
emotions ; one moment savagely gloating over the details of 
Antonio's misfortune, and the next, bursting into a frenzy at 
the particulars of his daughter's flight — the transitions from 
the one feeling to the other admitting not only of the finest 
dramatic rendering, but glittering with all the richness and 
lustre of the highest art. 

* The great master of every form of literary beauty gives 
a choice instance of the charm we derive from the grouping 
together of a large variety of cireum stances in the speech ot 
Dame Quickly, when she reminds Sir John FalstarY of his 
promise to marry her, and cites a number of minute con- 
comitant incidents, in order to overwhelm him with the 
truth of her assertion ; and prevent the possibility of any 
pretence of oblivion on his part. 

e< Falstaf. What is the gross sum I owe thee? 

" Hostess. Marry, if thou wert an honest man, thyself, and 
the money too. Thou didst swear to me upon a parcel-gilt 
goblet, sitting in my Dolphin- chamber, at the round table, 



254 Youxa benjamin fkanklix. 

of mental exercise, lad ; and you will see by-and- 
by, that as the irritability of the young muscles 

by a sea-coal fire, upon Wednesday in Whitsun-week, 
when the prince broke thy head for liking his father to a 
singing man of Windsor ; thou didst swear to me then, as I 
was washing thy wound, to marry me, and make me * my 
lady,' thy wife. Canst thou deny it? Did not goodwife 
Keech, the butcher's wife, come in then, and call me 
gossip Quickly ? coming in to borrow a mess of vinegar ; 
telling us, she had a good dish of prawns ; whereby thou 
didst desire to eat some ; whereby I told thee, they were ill 
for a green wound? And didst thou not, when she was 
gone down stairs, desire me to be no more so familiarity 
with such poor people ; saying, that ere long they should 
call me madam ? And didst thou not kiss me, and bid me 
fetch thee thirty shillings? I put thee now to thy book- 
oath ; deny it, if thou canst." — Second Part Henry iy. 
Act ii. Scene i. 

How beautifully fit, too, are many of these little pictu- 
resque " surroundings," and how delicately are they thrown 
in — e. g. ; " the parcel-gilt goblet," " the Dolphin chamber," 
"the singing man of Windsor," "the mess of vinegar," 
"the dish of prawns, whereby thou didst desire to eat some" 
then the reference to the "wound" is a fine touch, as 
is the desire that she should be no more so familiarity with 
such poor people. But the grandest stroke of all among 
the long list of accusations lies at the end — so exquisitely 
true is it to FalstarT's character. " Didst thou not kiss me," 
adds the Dame, "and bid me fetch thee thirty shillings?" 
This is a little morsel of artistic humour that has perhaps 
never been equalled, and certainly never transcended. 

How beautifully marked and various again is the group of 
concomitants in Dame Quickly's description of FalstafTs 
death ! 

'"A made a finer end, and went away, an it had been 
any christom child ; J a parted even just between twelve and 
one, e'en at the turning of the tide : for after I saw him 
fumble with the sheets, and play with the flowers, and 
smile upon his fingers' ends — I knew there was but one 
way ; for his nose was as sharp as a pen, and 'a babbled of 
green fields." 

Here the " smihng upon the fingers' ends" is a wonderful 
bit of death-painting — the fumbling with the sheets, too, is 
finely illustrative of the state of mental vacuity at such a 
time ; and when all these exquisitely-artistic associations are 



THE NEXT TURNING. 255 

naturally sobers down, and the intellect becomes 
more and more developed with advancing man- 



put together, — the christom child — the turning of the tide — 
the sheet-fumbling — the flower-playing — the finger-tip scan- 
ning — the nose sharp as a pen — and the babbling of green 
fields, what play is there in the transition from one associa- 
tion to the other — and yet what a choice and cunning picture 
it is ! what fine variety in the colour — still how soft and 
sombre the colouring ! and above all how truthful, and more 
than truthful, how typical the tone of the whole ! 

In Kabelais, again, may often be found curious grotesque 
instances of the amusement that is connected with the asso- 
ciation of a number of diverse particulars with one subject, 
though here the charm is more verbal than ideal, — e. g. : — 

" Master Janotus .... transported himself to the lodging 
of Gargantua, driving before him three red-muzzled beadles, 
and dragged after him five or six artless masters all thoroughly 
bedaggled with the mire of the streets — prattling gabblers/' 
proceeds the author, "licorous gluttons, freckled bitters 
(beggars), mangey rascals, lubberly louts, cozening foxes, 
sycophant varlets, scurvy sneaksbies, fondling fops, idle lusks, 
scoffing braggards, jobbernol goosecaps, woodcock slangams, 
noddipeak simpletons." 

But the delight afforded by mere literary-variety or change 
in the current of thought is often dexterously brought about 
by Charles Lamb, who was perhaps better skilled in the use 
of the parenthesis than any English writer that ever lived. 
In a true artist's hands, of course, the parenthesis, or even 
that modern off-shoot — the dash — is the means of what land- 
scape painters call " breaking up " lines and masses ; it is a 
kind of literary " shunting," as it were, or temporary shifting 
of the train of thought on to another line, and, finely used, 
gives the mind one of those slight jogs or jolts that serve 
to wake up the faculties, and which constitute perhaps the 
chief sense we have of movement in mere passive exercise. 
The following example is from Elia's " complaint as to the 
decay of beggars in the metropolis : — 

H A clerk in the Bank was surprised with the announce- 
ment of a five hundred pound legacy left him by a person 
whose name he was a stranger to. It seems that in his 
daily morning walks from Peckham (or some village there- 
abouts), where he lived, to his office, it had been his practice 
for the last twenty years to drop his halfpenny duly into the 
hat of some blind Bartimeus, that sate begging along by the 
wayside in the Borough. The good old beggar recognized 



256 YOUNG BENJAMIN FRANKLIN. 

hood, the athletic sports and games of youth pass 
gradually into the mental diversion of books, 



his daily benefactor by the voice only ; and when he died, 
left all the amassings of his alms (that had been half a 
century perhaps in the accumulating) to his old Bank friend. 
Was this a story to purse up people's hearts and pennies, 
against giving an alms to the blind ? or not rather a beautiful 
moral of well-directed charity on the one part, and noble 
gratitude upon the other ? 

" I sometimes wish I had been that Bank clerk. 

" I seem to remember a poor old grateful kind of creature, 
blinking, and looking up with his no eyes in the sun. 

" Is it possible I could have steeled my purse against him? 

" Perhaps I had no small change. 

" Header, do not be frightened at the hard words, imposi- 
tion, imposture. Give, and ask no questions, ' Cast thy bread 
upon the waters.' Some have unawares (like this Bank 
clerk) entertained angels." 

The parenthesis in the last line is set like a jewel with 
the nicest art, serving, as the little hard bit of crystal truth 
does, to assure the mind that the beggar and the angels are 
somewhat kin. 

Mr. Dickens, too, often uses the interposed sentence 
between dashes very adroitly. In the following choice little 
bit from the ' Pickwick Papers/ the interjected sentence is 
not only finely discursive, but so exquisitely suggestive of the 
affected humility of the red-nosed shepherd's character, as to 
be an admirable stroke of art. 

" Sam felt very strongly disposed to give the reverend 
gentleman something to groan for, but he repressed his in- 
clination, and merely asked (with reference to old Mr. 
Weller), ' What's the old 'mi been up to now ? 

" ' Up to, indeed !' said Mrs. Weller, ' oh, he has a hard 
heart. Night after night does this excellent man — don't 
frown, Mr. Stiggins : J will say you are an excellent man — 
come and sit here for hours together, and it has not the least 
effect upon him/ " — Pickioick Papers, p. 218. 

Again the little domestic interpolation, as to the price of 
red kidney potatoes, in the evidence of Mrs. Cluppins, in 
the celebrated trial scene of the same unctuous book, is a 
very happy touch, admirably characteristic as it is of the 
housewife, and yet deliciously comic from the very inappro- 
priateness of the piece of household information conveyed to 
" my lord and jury," by the lady, who found such difficulty 
in " composing herself*" on her entry into the witness box. 



THE NEXT TURNING. 257 

meditation, and converse ; nevertheless, it is still 
the same love of exercise that makes the occu- 
pation delightful in both cases ; for it is this which 
gives its special charm not only to the physical 
pastime, but to the intellectual amusement as 
well." . 

THE ' PLEASURES OF MENTAL EXCITEMENT. 

;; What are vou going to do next, uncle ?" asked 
little Ben. 

u Why, next we have to explain the pleasures 
of mental excitement," was the answer. 

4 -But, uncle, you did the pleasures of ease and 
satisfaction after the pleasures of exercise last 
time," suggested the lad; "and why don't you go 
on as you began ?" 

4i Because, Ben, here the one subject naturally 
passes into the other," returned Uncle Benjamin, 
"and in the other case it did not. You see, 
the love of change, — the love of those gentle and 
gradual transitions of mind (which are all that is 
meant by the term mental exercise) is intimately 
connected with the pleasure that we derive from 
the more violent alterations in the natural course 
of our thoughts, and such violent alterations are 
mainly concerned in producing that state which is 
failed ' mental excitement.' Indeed, excitement 
is but an exaggerated fomi of exercise in the mind, 



"'What were you doing iu the back room, ma'am?' in- 
quired the little judge. 

' f ' My lord and jury,' said Mrs. Cluppins, with interesting 
agitation. ' I will not deceive you.' 

" l You had better not, ma'am,' said the little judge. 

" ' I was there,' resumed Mrs. Cluppins, ' onbeknown to 
Mrs. Bardell. I had been out with a little basket, gentle- 
men, to buy three pound of red kidney purtaties — which was 
three pound tuppence ha'penny — when I see Mrs. Bardeli's 
street-door on the jar.' "—PlcJcicieh Papers, p, 283. 

S 



258 YOUXG BENJAMIN FRAXKLIX. 

and, intellectually speaking, requires only an ex-* 
aggerated form of the same conditions to produce 
it. Ordinary change merely exercises the mind, 
but extraordinary transition, you will find, inordi- 
nately excites it. To produce that change or 
play of thought which constitutes mental exercise, 
nothing but a succession of slightly different per- 
ceptions is necessary ; but to throw the mind into 
a state of excitement intellectually, it is essential 
that some widely different impression, or even 
one that is diametrically opposite from our previous 
expectations, should be made upon us. Indeed, 
the difference must be so marked as to produce a 
startling effect upon us ; and it is the love of these 
startling effects, and the pleasure we derive from 
the extra-vividness of the impressions produced 
by them, which constitutes the great charm that 
many find in the principle of mental excitement. 
The delight, for example, that is felt in contemplat- 
ing — at a distance — the extraordinary phenomena 
of nature : the grandeur of the wild rage of the 
storm ; the convulsive throes of the heaving earth- 
quake ; the mighty fountain of fire poured forth 
by the burning volcano, and the crimson cascades 
of liquid lava streaming, like the earth's hot blood,. 
down the mountain-sides ; the jewelled stalactite 
caverns of the world, their roofs glittering with 
their deep fringe of pendant crystals, as though 
they were huge petrified icicles ; the giant caves, 
with their monster columnar rocks, that are like 
the council-halls of devils ; the immense icebergs 
floating in the arctic seas, and lurking there, like 
tremendous white bears, ready to crush the bones 
of any stray vessel that may chance to fall within 
their adamantine grip ; the thick daylight-dark- 
ness of the eclipse, that affrights the cattle in the 
fields ; the ominous-looking fire-mist of the comet ; 
the flaming dart of the falling star, that seems 



THE NEXT TURNING. 259 

to streak the heavens with a line of fire as it 
descends ; the never-ending flood of the cataract, 
with its flashes of silver lightning and roar of 
liquid thunder ; these are the natural stimulants 
of the innate vender of our souls, and which, awful 
as they may seem in all the terror of their reality, 
yet "become the grandest and loveliest objects 
when ideally regarded by us. It is the same 
mental propensity that leads the more sluggish 
intellectual natures among mankind to find delight 
in those gross monstrosities, and wild freaks of 
nature, which are usually found in shows at fairs, 
and which act as drams upon the languid current 
of thought and imagination among the vulgar. 
Again, it is the natural delight of man in wonders 
and marvels that makes us all, more or less, have 
a trace of the grandmother and the child for 
ever stamped upon our mind ; finding, as we do, a 
strange winsomeness in those nursery tales of giants 
and ogres, fairies and pixies, hobgoblins and bogies, 
that we hear almost in our cradle ; as well as in 
those mystic stories of ghosts and death-fetches, 
presentiments, omens, and witchery, which are 
only the hazy foreshadowings of that strange 
supernatural life and sense which we must carry 
with us to our grave." 

i; How beautiful it is, uncle! Do you know, 
I fancy I can just begin to see now a little bit 
into my own nature?" exclaimed the boy, in a 
more serious tone than he had yet spoken. 

••There is but little light yet, Ben," returned 
the old man. " At best, we are but prisoners in a 
dark dungeon, and we must look, and look for a 
long time into our own souls, before we can dis- 
cern anything in the obscurity. Still, with long- 
looking, the mental eye becomes at last acclimated 
as it were to the darkness, and begins to make out 
first one little object, and then another. But we 

s2 



2G0 YOUNG BENJAMIN FRANKLIN. 

want the light of heaven, lad — the light of heaven ! 
to illuminate the insect, before even the highest 
microscopic vision can see it clearly. We mustn't 
wander, however, from our purpose. Now, not 
only does our love of extra-vivid impressions, 
Ben, make us find delight in the marvellous, as well 
as in the wonders of the world, and also in the ex- 
traordinary, or even strange, phenomena of nature, 
but it causes us likewise to derive a special pleasure 
from the astonishing and surprising events and 
objects in life, nature, and art too. When anything 
occurs, or is presented to us, that is entirely dif- 
ferent froniwhat we have expected, we are astonished; 
and when it comes upon us utterly unexpected, 
we are surprised. If any one, for example, were to 
come behind you at this moment in the dark," — - 
and as the uncle said the words, the boy looked 
round half frightened, so as to assure himself that 
there was no possibility of such an event occur- 
ring to him, "and to seize you suddenly by the 
nape of the neck, you would experience a sensa- 
tion, something like to an electric shock, all 
through your frame, and which would convulse for 
the moment every limb in your body. And then, 
if you were to turn round and discover that it 
was only brother Nehemiah or Jabez, after all, 
who had found out where you were, and crept 
softly up to you, so as to have a bit of fun with 
you ; why then, lad, the alarm would cease in an 
instant, and you would fall to laughing at what 
is termed the ' agreeable surprise ' you had ex- 
perienced." 

The little fellow, indeed, smiled at the mere 
imagination of such an incident occurring to 
him. 

" Again, if you were to go, over to England, say, 
and suddenly discover, in the person of the Lord 
Mayor of London, let us suppose, your own long- 



THE NEXT TURNING* 261 

lost brother Josiah, who ran away to"sea in oppo- 
sition to his father's will ; why then of course you 
would be mightily and agreeably astonished to find 
the outcast, who, you fancy, is now leading a half- 
savage life somewhere in the backwoods, had 
become transmogrified* into the first civic func- 
tionary of the first city in the world." 

kt So I should, of course," interjected the lad. 

"Xow these feelings of surprise and astonish- 
ment, Ben," the uncle went on, " are feelings that 
serve to give intense vividness to the objects or 
circumstances which produce them ; that is to 
say, they throw the mind into a state of violent 
excitement for a time, which is very different from 
the gentle stimulus produced by the mere exercise 
of it ; and this violent excitement of course tends 
to impress the causes of the emotion with increased 
force upon the brain. They are true mental stimu- 
lants, suddenly giving increased vigour to all the 
faculties and sensibilities of our nature — like wine, 
or even opium. — and if indulged in to excess, they 
tend at last, like the physical stimulants them- 
selves, to enfeeble rather than strengthen the 
natural powers. Thus, then, we come at the 
reason why the highly-spiced works of fiction and 
the tricky dramas of the stage (though it's many 
a long year now since I saw any of them), which 
are filled with extravagant incidents and startling 
surprises, as well as such extraordinary cha- 
racters as are the. mere caricatures of human fri- 
volities and singularities, rather than types of 
human passion ; these productions are not only 

* The young reader should be warned that the common 
colloquial expression here made use of by Uncle Benjamin 
is a vulgarism. A little reflection will show that there is 
no such root as " mogrify " existing in any language. The 
term is evidently an ignorant corruption of the word " trans- 
modify" to change the mode, or form of a thing. 



262 YOUNG- BENJAMIN FRANKLIN. 

contemptible as works of art, but baneful to 
healthy mental digestion — that digestion which 
is wanted to exert itself upon less fiery and more 
solid food, and has often to put up with the dry 
and hard cud of philosophy which requires to be 
chewed over and over again, lad, before it can be 
swallowed ; such romantic trash, I say, is as detri- 
mental to sound taste and mental sanity, as your 
hot peppers, sharp sauces, and your drops of raw 
spirits are destructive of the natural functions 
of the stomach. Nevertheless, lad, though the 
feelings of surprise and astonishment go to make 
up the glitter and finery of trashy and extrava- 
gant art, they are after all, in a subdued form, the 
great enliven ers of mental existence ; and serve to 
add the finishing stroke, when touched with true 
artistic delicacy, to all works and objects of high 
beauty. They give, as it were, that gloss and lustre 
of varnish to the picture, which brings out all the , 
colours with finer force — the polish and sparkle of 
many facets to the jewels — the sunlight that at 
once brightens and warms up the landscape. The 
feeling of admiration, indeed, which all true 
beauty inspires, has so much of wonder and asto- 
nishment in its nature, that one cannot but feel 
that the loveliness, even of perfection itself, 
would be only a kind of platonic loveliness, if it 
did not at once astonish us with its transcendent 
grace, and set us wondering at the marvellousness 
of its consummate excellence. The beauty of 
nature and high art has always something extra- 
ordinary about it. Though we have looked upon 
the magnificent glory of the clouds, and gazed 
upon the very sumptuousness of gold and crimson, 
with which the sun drapes the heavens and tints 
the air at morning and evening, some hundreds of 
times in our lives, yet there is nothing old and 
familiar about the sight : the grandeur of to-day 



THE XEXT TUimXG-. 263 

is not the worn-out grandeur of yesterday ; for the 
.scene is still so entirely novel in the grouping of 
the forms of the clouds, the splendour and tone of 
the colours, and the very tint of the pinky light 
itself — that we cannot but wonder and wonder on, 
day after day, even till we gaze at it for the last 
time of all. So, too, with the works of high art. 
It is the peculiar quality of all force, lad, that 
there is no principle of decay in it (a ball once 
made to move would keep moving on to all eter- 
nity, Ben, if there were nothing to stop it), and 
it is the same with the force of immortal genius. 
It is at once self-sustaining and indestructible. A 
truly grand work is young, fresh, and vigorous to 
the end of all time. Study it never so ofren — scan 
it till the mind seems to know every fragment of 
it. as well as the mother knows every little linea- 
ment of her infant's face ; and yet come to it 
again, and a new world of beauty and wonder will 
still burst out once more from the well-thumbed 
page, or old familiar canvas ; even as that mo- 
ther can see the well-scanned face of her in- 
fant light up with a new expression with each new 
smile.'' 

Young Ben was mute with the contemplation 
naturally begotten by the charm of his uncle's 
theme ; and he sat thinking in silence of the great 
books he had read over and over again— of old 
John Banyan's 'Pilgrim's Progress,' and Butler's 
4 Hudibras,' and Milton's mighty epic, and Shak- 
speare's wondrous plays (Uncle Ben had had a 
hard fight with Josiah to allow the boy to read 
the plays), and, last of all, of De Foe's simple 
'Eobinson Crusoe,' — and thinking, too. how 
strange it was that he should never tire of read- 
ing them ; whilst there were others at which he 
could not look, after he had had his rill of the 
mere story contained in them ; even though his 



264 YOUNG BENJAMIN FRANKLIN. 

'mind had travelled never so pleasantly over ih& 
pages at the time. 

44 In wit as well as beauty," added the old man,, 
"it is the gay surprise, the happy astonishment 
begotten by the unexpectedness of the lively re- 
partee or sally— of the quaint idea, or odd simile 
— or of the choice grotesque expression, thattickles, 
while it startles us, with the novelty, and yet 
with the queerness and aptness of the thought.* In 
the anecdote of the dull and prosy clergyman, who 
was reproving his flock for their habit of going to 
sleep during the sermon, and who sought to shame^ 
them by reminding them that even Jimmy, the 
wretched idiot in the free seats, could keep himself 
awake ; whereupon a wag returned that ' if Jimmy 
hadn't been a wretched idiot, he would have been 
asleep too :' — in this anecdote, of course, it is the 
unexpectedness of the retort — the sharp backward 
cut of the foil, that startles us as much as anything* 
So, too, in that pinchbeck kind of wit called pui> 
ning, we are taken aback by the double meaning 
of the term on which the pun is made, and thus 
pleasantly startled again by the use of the word in 
a different sense from what we expected. Whe:a 
King Charles the Second, for instance, bade 
Eochester make a joke, and Eochester asked the 
monarch to name a subject — the ready reply of 
the wit, on the king's naming himself, that his 
majesty could not possibly be a "subject" startles 
us slightly, when we first hear it, from the 
"widely different sense given to the word subject 
itself. Moreover, it is to the vivid impressions 

* That curious style of " funuiment," called Americanisms, 
also depends upon the pleasure the mind finds in extremes- 
for the greater part of its amusement. For instance, when 
we are told that " there is a nigger woman in South Carolina,, 
who has a child so black that charcoal makes a white mark 
upon it, the fancy is carried almost to the very verge of 



THE NEXT TURNING. 265- 

produced by widely different and diametrically 
opposite ideas and objects, when made to succeed. 

common sense ; and the effect produced is a vain endeavour 
to comprehend the incomprehensible, in connection with a. 
mean instead of a grand idea — the same as if we were 
trying to realize a funny infinity. Again, the peculiar 
■blunders called " hulls " are funny to us, because the mind con- 
trasts the meaning with the sense expressed ; as, for example,, 
when we are told that an Irish gentleman had a small room 
full of pictures, which he was about to show to a number of 
his friends at the same time, but on finding that they all 
made a rush to the door at once, he cried out, as he endea- 
voured to restrain the more impatient, "Faith, gintle- 
niin, if ye will go in together, it'll nivir hould the half of ye :" 
here we know well enough what the Irish gentleman meant,, 
but this is so different from what he really said, and the 
contradiction of all his guests going into a room that wouldn' t 
hold half of them — all this is so marked that it is impossible 
not to laugh at the inconsistency under such circumstances. 
Further, there are the verbal blunders—those odd mistakes 
of words — which are styled " Malapropisms," after Sheridan's 
celebrated character in ' The Rivals.' It is this form of wit 
which delights us so much with the letters of Winifred 
Jenkins, by Smollett, or those of Mrs. Eamsbottom by Theo- 
dore Hook, and others by Thomas Hood ; for who can help 
smiling when they hear an old citizen extol the virtues of 
*' industry, perseverance, and acidity 7 ," or a vulgar old dame 
declare that a bright dry winter's day is "fine embracing 
weather "? Moreover, there are the inconsistencies of those 
intentional mistakes which belong to the class of "Ana- 
chronisms," and where the small modicum of fun lies, as in our 
modern burlesques, in putting Minerva into blue stockings 
and blue spectacles, and giving Mars a shell jacket and 
Piccadilly whiskers, or making Diana smoke cigars and talk 
slang ; or else it is expressed in that strange and ingenious 
nonsense which consists of a kind of anachronous farrago,, 
where the several events of history have been as it were 
rattled together in some droll kaleidoscopic fancy, and mads- 
to tumble into the queerest possible forms. Akin to these 
intentional anachronisms, or "cross-times," as it were, are the 
" cross-readings," or those curious jumbles of sense that either 
startle us to laughter with the oddness of the ideas that are- 
thus brought into juxtaposition, or else set us wondering at the- 
ingenuity of the arrangement. There are a few specimens, 
of this form of fun preserved in the "New Foundliwi 



266 YOUXG BENJAMIN FRANKLIN. 

one another immediately in the mind, that such 
lively delight is found in the principle of contrast, 
as I before explained to you, lad; though then 
I enforced upon you the charms that belong, prin- 
cipally, to contrasted physical objects. In art, 
however, the extremes of contrast are often effec- 
tive for a while, though your mere black and 
white style of painting generally belongs to that 
coarser kind of effect which is requisite to enliven 
duller perceptions and tastes. The figure of anti- 
theses, nevertheless, is always brilliant in literary 
composition ; for there is a natural sparkle in the 
collocation of any two directly opposite ideas : as, 
for instance, in the two terms of life — the cradle 
and the grave ; the two extremes of human emo- 
tions — smiles and tears ; the two opposite types of 
wealth and want — Dives and Lazarus ; of worldly 
power and helplessness — the monarch and the 



Hospital for Wit," the principal of which are extracts from 
the old w Public Adveriizer," and the drollery of which 
consists in the odd associations that are frequently brought 
about by reading a newspaper across two adjoining 
columns — rather than down each column singly in the usual 
manner, e. g. : — 

Last night the Princess Royal was baptized — Mary, alias Moll Hackett, alias Black Moll. 
Yesterday the new Lord Mayor was sworn in — afterwards tossed and gored several persons. 

Again, in the double letter attributed to Cardinal Riche- 
lieu (which when read in single columns expresses one 
sense, and when read across has a totally different significa- 
tion), there is enough art to make us marvel at the skill, 
and yet such a sense of labour with it all, that our admiration 
is alloyed with the idea that it was hardly worth while 
taking such pains, as the author must, to compass so trifling 
an end ; to wit : — 

Sir, 

Mons. Compc-igne, a Savoyard by birth, a Friar of the order of St. Benedict, 

is the man who will present "to you as his passport to your protection, 

this letter. tie is one of the most discreet, the wisest, and the least 

meddling persons I have ever known, or have had the pleasure to converse with, 

etc. etc. etc. " etc. etc. etc. 



THE NEXT TURNING. 287 

slave.* Again, as the high lights of a picture 
are always in the foreground, and the greatest 
depth of shade to be found there too, so even 
'Shakspeare himself often resorts to the principle 
of contrast, to tkrow up the brilliances of some of 
his foremost characters. Thus, in ; Romeo and 
Juliet,' the old nurse is an exquisite foil to bring- 
out all the lustre and richness of the young ripe 
love of Juliet ; and even in the coiitemplativeness 
of the old Friar, sworn to celibacy and the life of 
an ascetic, and yet who is sufficiently human to 
delight in matrimony and the beautiful world about 
him, what a charming set-off have we to the hot- 
blooded young Borneo, now moody in woods, and 
now burning with the flame of his first real pas- 
sion ; and what a lively relief, again, is the merry 
and voluble light-heartedness of the fairy-spirited. 
Mercutio, even to Eomeo himself! Moreover, in 
* Lear,' what exquisite, contrasted force is there in 
those extremes of demention — the two opposite 
and widely distant verges of mental eccentricity 
— shown in the wild madness of the king, and the 
cunning foolery of the fool ! And so in ' Hamlet,' 
we have the touching and tender madness of the 
young, broken-hearted girl, as depicted in Ophelia, 
contrasted with the ' insanity of purpose ' — the 
mental wandering and vacillation of a weak and 
noble nature — exemplified in Hamlet himself. 
The grave scene, too, in the same play, is resplen- 
dent with the same brilliance of contrasted idio- 
syncrasies ; for here we have the quaint logical 
merriment of the old gravedigger played off 
against the fine philosophic utterances of the 
young Danish prince ; — all these are sufficient to 

*'The delight that some find in paradoxes, and even in 
what the vulgar will call " contrayriness" may be referred 
to the same principle. 



268 YOUNG BENJAMIN FRANKLIN. 

show you, lad, that the principle of contrast, 
when nicely and skilfully handled, can lend some 
of its highest and most lustrous beauties to the 
picture. And with that ends the list of the chief 
pleasures that arise from mental excitement, my 
son."* 

THE PLEASURE OF MENTAL SATISFACTION. 

" And now you're going to do the pleasures of 
mental satisfaction, ain't you, uncle ?" asked the 
boy. 

* The best example of the literary glitter produced by the 
figure of contrast is, so far as we know, the collocation of the 
wonders revealed by the telescope and microscope, penned 
by Dr. Chalmers, and which is certainly a brilliant instance 
of its kind. There is perhaps a leetle too much art apparent, 
in the balance of the sentences and continued vibration of 
the mind from the infinitely great to the infinitely small ; 
and perhaps it is just a taste too saccharine to fully satisfy 
the highly educated palate. Nevertheless, as an illustra- 
tion of the charms of this rhetorical form, it is at once signal 
and salient. 

" The one led me to see a system in every star ; the other 
leads me to see a world in every atom. The one taught me 
that this mighty globe, with the whole burden of its people 
and of its countries, is but a grain of sand on the high field 
of immensity ; the other teaches me that every grain of sand 
may harbour within it the tribes and the families of a busy 
population. The one told me of the insignificance of the 
world I tread upon ; the other redeems it from all its insig- 
nificance, for it tells me that in the leaves of every forest, 
and in the flowers of every garden, and in the waters of 
every rivulet, there are worlds teeming with life, and num* 
berless as are the glories of the firmament. The one has 
suggested to me that beyond and above all that is visible to 
man there may be fields of creation which sweep immeasur- 
ably along, and carry the impress of the Almighty's hand to 
the remotest scenes of the universe ; the other suggests t© 
me, that within and beneath all that minuteness which the 
aided eye of man has been able to explore, there may be a 
region of invisibles ; and that, could we draw aside the mys- 
terious curtain which shrouds it from our senses, we might 
there see a theatre of as many wonders as astronomy has ui> 



THE NEXT TURNING. 269 

"Yes, lad!" was the answer; "for, the con- 
sideration of the love of change, inherent in our 

folded — a universe within the compass of a point so small 
as to elude all the powers of the microscope ; but where the 
wonder-working God finds room for the exercise of all his 
attributes, where He can raise another mechanism of worlds, 
smd fill and animate them with all the evidences of his 
glory." 

The only fault here, we repeat, is the obviousness of the 
art ("errs est celare artem"), so that the reader is led to see 
the trick, as it were, by which the effect is produced. The 
fairy piece which enchants us from the front of the theatre 
is but poor tawdry clumsy work, viewed from behind the 
,-:cenes ; and hence the verses of Pope and Tommy Moore, 
exquisitely artistic as they are, become mere elaborations of 
wit rather than flashes of true poetic fire — choice specimens 
of mental handicraft from the very excess of art that has been 
wasted upon them, rather than those fine facile creations 
which precede rule instead of following it : so that to pass 
from the dead level of the perfect polish of such work to 
the rich, rough, and forcible fervour of true poetic genius, as 
shown in Shakspeare, is the same as shifting the mind 
from the contemplation of mere filigree work to the stu- 
pendous achievements of modern engineering, — from look- 
ing at a Berlin bracelet in spun cast-iron to the massive 
grandeur of the tubular bridge, or the dizzy triumph of the 
£i via mala.'' 

But if the quotation from Dr. Chalmers is hardly a perfect 
specimen of this form of literary beauty —because the artistry 
of it is just a shade too marked, wLat can be said of the 
following extract, where we have not a scintilla of beauty, 
but merely clap-trap artifice and extravagance instead ? Here 
the form which, with a person of true taste, can be made to 
yield such exquisite delight, becomes positively ugly as an 
oilman's shop front, from the patchwork of glaring colours in 
which it is tricked out. The effect is consequently merely 
"loud," not " tasty ;" and that black and white, which in a 
Rembrandt's etching is a world of beauty, becomes as vulgar 
and inartistic as the sign of the " Chequers " on a public- 
house door. 

" It was the best of times : it was the icorst of times ; it was 
the aye of wisdom; it was the age of foolishness ; it was the 
gpoch of belief ; it was the epoch of incredulity ; it was the 
season of light; it was the season of darkness; it was the 
spring of hope ; it was the itinter of despair ; we had every- 



270 YOUNG BENJAMIN FRANKLIN. 

mental nature, cleared the way for the explanation 
of our delight in those vivid impressions which 



thing before us : we liad nothing before us; we were all going 
direct to heaven; we were all going direct the other way ; in. 
short, the period was so far like the present period that some 
of its noisiest authorities insisted on its being received, for 
good or for evil, in the superlative degree of comparison 
only." — Tale of Two Cities. 

Such fatal blemishes as the above are really like rash 
attempts at literary suicide, in a man who has no necessity to 
stoop to trick to produce an impression. But who can 
forget the wretched " artful dodges " of" the kettle began it ;" 
no, " the cricket began it," in the * Cricket on the Hearth,' 
and the raving melo- dramatic rubbish of " up, up, up," and 
"down, down, down," and "round, round, round," in the 
' Chimes/ Such overdoing as this surely " cannot but make 
the judicious grieve." 

Now compare the crudity of the above piece of verbal 
trickery with the high polish and sparkle of the following- 
bit of elegant artifice from Sheridan's wonderful elabora- 
tion of wit, ' The School for Scandal.' It will be seen that it 
is still the contrasted figure of speech that gives the fine 
relish to the subjoined dainty morsel of literary luxury ; and 
though it has all the studied artificiality of wit, and wants the 
honest geniality of delicate humour to give it the true ring 
of spontaneous, rather than affected, merriment, nevertheless, 
it must be confessed that the play and oscillation of the 
antithesis is kept up in a masterly manner, and that the 
whim vibrates as airily and elegantly as a shuttlecock be* 
tween the battledores in skilful hands. 

"Sir Peter Teazle. — When an old bachelor marries a 
young wife, what is he to expect ? 'Tis now six months 
since Lady Teazle made me the happiest of men, and I have 
been the most miserable dog ever since ! We tift a little 
going to church, and fairly quarrelled before the bells had, done 
ringing. I was more than once nearly choked with gall 
during the honeymoon, and had lost all comfort in life before 
my friends had done wishing me joy. Yet I chose with 
caution — a girl bred wholly in the country, who never knev, r 
luxury beyond one silk gown, nor dissipation above the 
annual gala of a race-ball, though she now plays her part in 
all the extravagant fopperies of fashion and the town, with as 
ready a grace as if she never had seen a bush or grass-plot 
out of Grosvenor Square!" — School for Scandal, Act 1, 

SCEXE II. 



THE NEXT TUHXIXG. 271 

are connected with states of mental excitement ; 
and the understanding of the latter subject has, 
in its turn, fitted us, in a measure, for the due com- 
prehension of the charms which spring from our 
instinctive longing for a state of mental ease. 
Before we can desire or feel the delights of ease, 
however, we must exist in some state of uneasiness. 
Best and repose are pleasurable to us only after 
violent exertion and consequent fatigue : even as 
exercise itself is especially charming after long- 
rest and consequent tedium. So, again, before 
we can feel satisfied, we must have hungered ; 
there must have been a precedent craving, in order 
to enjoy that thorough contentment of soul which 
is a necessary consequence of the perfect appease- 
ment of the previous longing. We must therefore, 
Ben, set about discovering what this state of mental 
uneasiness is, that corresponds with the bodily un- 
easiness of appetite, as well as with the wearisome- 
ness of physical fatigue ; we must do this before we 
can get thoroughly down to the source of the delight 
which comes from the allaying of the uneasy feel- 
ing. Now, though we are gladdened by change, 
or digfA differences, and agreeably astonished by 
the perception of extreme differences among things, 
we are, on the other hand, disgusted by any mere 
heterogeneous chaos or confused tangle of ideas 



The "luxury " of the " one silk gown," and the u dissipa- 
tion" of the "animal gala of the race-ball," as well as 
the "bush or grass-plot out of Grosvenor Square/' are nice 
delicate touches of wit, though out of the contrasted form. 

As another illustration of the contrary form of wit, we 
may cite those paradoxical maxims which startle us with 
their opposition to common opinion, and yet with their 
truthfulness to a certain kind of debased nature : as for in- 
stance, when Eochefoucauld defines gratitude to be ; - a lively 
expectation of favours to come,'' and Talleyrand explains 
Speech to be the faculty given to man as the means of 
concealing his real thoughts and feelings. 



1 rl YOUNG- BENJAMIN FEANKLIN. 

and objects. The transitions from one state of 
mind to the other, which make us so delighted 
with change and variety, must, in order to delight 
us, he essentially rhythmical as it were ; that is to 
♦say, there must be a mellifluence, or nice gradation 
about it, or else it would not correspond with that 
series of gentle and congenial muscular actions 
which is termed physical exercise. Again, the 
inordinate vividness of the impressions, which 
causes us to find so much mental pleasure in the 
more astonishing phenomena of nature, is pleasur- 
able principally because this same inordinate 
vividness serves, as it were, to let in a sudden 
burst of light upon the brain ; and so to render the 
astonishing objects themselves more distinct than 
they would otherwise be to our hazy perceptions. 
But though those things, which are extremely 
different, thus become extremely distinct, when 
presented to the mind with all the force of colloca- 
tion and consequent astonishment, nevertheless 
such things as are utterly heterogeneous in nature 
— that is to say, totally separate and disjointed — 
are merely rendered indistinct and confused when 
juxtaposited ; and thus, instead of gaining extra 
light from the juxtaposition, they really appear 
•even more confounded than they naturally are, 
and so become more obscure ; whilst the increase 
of the natural obscurity serves to make such per- 
ceptions as hateful to us as darkness itself. There 
must be some principle of coherence, lad — some 
slight thread on which to string the beads of our 
thoughts and perceptions — some fine connecting 
bondof common sense to unite the series —otherwise 
the irrelevant sequence has all the incomprehensi- 
bility of nonsense, and the wild chaos of ideas all 
the incoherence of madness ; than which, perhaps, 
there is nothing so maddening to attend to. True 
mental uneasiness, then, springs from that state of 



THE NEXT TURNING. 2 To 

perplexity and bewilderment, that sense of con- 
foundedness and distractedness of mind, which we 
experience whenever the thoughts appear to run 
wild, as it were, and to crowd upon the brain with 
all the inconsequence of delirium and all the 
disorder and unconnectedness of over-excitement or 
phrensy. Thus, lad, you perceive by what fine 
shades and gradations the rainbow hues of the 
emotions pass into one another. A slight difference 
or change produces the pleasurable feeling of 
mental exercise. A wide . and marked difference 
or contrast occasions the livelier pleasure of mental 
excitement ; whereas total dissimilarity and discon- 
nection give rise to org?*-excitement and that con- 
sequent uneasy state, which is termed mental per- 
plexity or bewilderment." 

" Yes, I can see it as you explain it now," 
ejaculated the youth. 

" Well, it is often the case, Ben, when anything 
very extraordinary is presented to the mind, that 
the astonishment occasioned by the perception 
of it, is succeeded by a state of wonder ; and this is 
literally the dwelling or fond and lovely lingering 
of the soul over the object which has excited its 
admiration.* But this tendency to linger over the 
admirable and extraordinary, naturally sets the 
intellect speculating as to the cause or special 
excellence of the rare event or object before us ; 
and then, if the wonder cannot be satisfied, if the 



* The primitive meaning of the Latin root miror in ad- 
miratio is to be fonnd in the Armoric word Mirez — to hold, 
stop, dwell ; and whence comes the Fr. Demeurer, and our 
Demur, and Moor (as a ship). So the Anglo-Saxon Won- 
drian, to wonder, is connected with onr old English word to 
ivone, to dwell (Sax. Weunan) ; and Wont, custom. The 
primary sense of astonishment, on the other hand, is that 
stunning of the mind which is produced by any loud noise or 
din — such as thunder and other astounding phenomena. 

T 



274 YOUXG BENJAMIN FKANKLIN. 

marvel cannot be explained, if the rarity be utterly 
unlike anything ever seen before, and there be no 
apparent means of learning whence it came, or how- 
it happened, or to what type it belongs — then, I 
say, such a veil of mystery seems to ns to envelop 
it, and such a jostling crowd of idle speculations 
concerning it, keep rushing into the brain ; such a 
chaos of incoherent conjectures at once encumber 
and confound the reason, that as the mind attends 
to one vague surmise after another, and still finds 
no clue to the tangle, no resting-place in the wil- 
derness, and sees not a solitary star-speck of light 
glimmering through the darkness of the clouds — 
why then the wonder-stricken are lost in a worry- 
ing maze of bewilderment, as it is called, and 
grow restless under the unesiness of the per- 
plexity that fetters their understanding ; while 
they are devoured by a positive craving of curiosity 
that keeps gnawing and gnawing at the soul, 
like the eagle at the heart of poor struggling 
Prometheus chained to the rock. The mental 
action which accompanies a state of perplexity, 
then, you will perceive, lad, is essentially different 
from the movement of the mind in a state of 
exercise : in the latter state the thoughts flow- 
naturally and steadily onward ; but in perplexity 
there is no advance, but merely that mental oscil- 
lation or vacillation — that continued shifting back- 
wards and forwards, to and from the perplexing 
object, which is always connected with doubt and 
distraction. It is this protracted flutter of the mind, 
this unpleasant palpitation of the soul, as it were, 
this spasmodic throb of thought in the state of 
doubt that makes the feeling so distressing^ us 
all, and which gives it its principal uneasiness ; 
while the uneasiness itself excites in us the same 
yearning and gnawing as a bodily craving to 
appease it. It is indeed <\ mental appetite, that 



THE NEXT TURNING. 27o 

"hunger of the intellect for some object that will 
satisfy it ; that yearning for knowledge and enlight- 
enment, which is termed curiosity when .stirred by 
the more trivial riddles and puzzles of life, and 
philosophy, when moved by the great mysteries of 
nature itself. Hence you can easily understand, 
lad, that whatever serves to allay the great intel- 
lectual want of our minds becomes as palatable to 
our brain, as even food or drink to the hungering or 
thirsting body ; ay, and it leaves behind it the same 
sense of satisfaction and contentment, as we feel 
when the bodily appetite is thoroughly appeased. 
Anything, therefore, which tends to clear up our 
doubts ; to unravel, be it never so little, the 
tangled skein of circumstances encompassing our 
lives — to give us the least enlightenment in the 
pitchy darkness of the world's mysteries, is as 
delightful and comforting to the bewildered and 
troubled intellect, as the allaying of bodily anguish 
and bodily fatigue ; for it brings sweet relief to the 
aching brain, blessed mental rest to the mentally 
weary. " 

¥ Strange, isn't it, uncle, that there should be 
the same appetites in our mind as there are in our 
body,*' remarked the little fellow, "and that we 
should feel the same want for knowledge as we do 
for food!" 

The old man scarcely heard the boy's remark, 
however, for he was too much absorbed in his 
subject to be diverted from the continuity of his 
own thoughts, so on he went : " Now it is the 
delight and soothing repose of the soul that we 
feel in states of mental satisfaction, that is the 
main cause of the transcendent charms we find in 
the contemplation of perfection itself: a perfect 
circle even, for instance ; a perfect crystal without 
flaw or speck ; a perfect face, with all the features 
in due proportion, finely chiselled, and radiant at 

t 2 



276 YOUNG BENJAMIN FRANKLIN. 

once with, health, cheerfulness, intelligence^ 
and kindness ; a perfect human form, exquisitely 
modelled, perfect in its symmetry and the fine 
flowing outline of the limbs, and perfect in the 
grace of its gestures, and the lithsome ease of 
its actions ; or, indeed, a perfect anything, even 
up to the one Transcendent Perfection — the 
perfection of all perfection — God himself. In- 
deed, not only does the feeling of perfect mental 
satisfaction give rise to the pleasure we find in 
perfection of all kinds, and hence lie at the 
very root of our love of beauty ; but it is evident 
that we never feel mentally satisfied with any- 
thing so long as we can discover any imperfec- 
tion, any defect or blemish in it. And the dis- 
satisfaction we feel at the perception of any 
defect or blemish is a state of mental uneasiness 
that greatly annoys and irritates the mind. Even 
a button off a coat is particularly vexing to the 
eye ; a thing out of straight, out of square, or 
out of truth, as carpenters say ; a book with a 
page of the text torn out ; a set of some great 
author's works wanting one volume, and so on ; 
these are things that it is impossible to be pleased 
with, and that simply because the mind cannot 
exist in a state of satisfaction and contentment, so 
long as the sense of the want is impressed upon 
it. There must be absolute integrity of all the 
parts, otherwise the detection of the smallest de- 
ficiency will be sure to change the beauty into an 
ugliness, the paragon into a deformity ; for de- 
formity itself is only an excessive variation from 
that type which is considered to be the perfect 
form of things. So again, we delight in anything 
which seems to give us that perfect understand- 
ing, or grasp of all the parts, or thorough sense of 
a subject which is called the comprehension of it ; 
even as, on the contrary ? we hate what conveys 



THE NEXT TURNING. 277 

iro sense at all to us, or, in other words, is utter 
non-sense to our minds. It is, indeed, from the 
mental satisfaction that we feel upon the solving 
of any mystery, and the removing of the natural 
uneasiness of perplexity, that such high delight is 
found in the study of natural philosophy by those 
minds which are struck by the mighty mystery of 
the world about them ; and even though the light 
afforded by the stud)' be but as feeble as that 
cottager's lamp yonder, shooting the golden 
spider-threads of its rays far into the darkness of 
the distance, yet there is the same charm in the 
study to the thoughtful man, as that earth-star has 
to the wanderer in the night : for to the intellectual 
miner, working deep under the surface, the faintest 
ray is sufficient for continuing the toil. Besides, 
there is a fine, rich and sombre beauty, lad, in the 
1 clear obscure ' — in that mere glimmer of light 
which simply serves, as Milton grandly says, to 
make the darkness visible ; and if philosophy does 
but make out to us the black background of infi- 
nite space and infinite distance, frowning between 
the tiny star-points of its small discoveries — like 
the vast endless cavern of the incomprehensible 
— there is still a solemn and deep beauty in con- 
templating the fine, massive, and unfathomable 
darkness, that walls in the world of man's know- 
ledge, and looking into it, as one loves to try and 
fathom with the eye the unfathomable depths of 
the great ocean itself; even while we wonder, 
wonder, and wonder, as we strain the sight till 
the tears come, what is at the bottom of it all. 

Again,'' he proceeded, ' ; the pleasure that is 
found in clever theories and lucid explanations, 
in happy illustrations and apt examples, pro- 
ceeds from the same source — the love of light 
in darkness, the love of rest after weariness. 
Sow I pointed out to you before, Ben, that a 



278 YOUNG BENJAMIN FRANKLIN. 

sense of incoherence and disconnectedness, among 
a number of consecutive things, distracts and, in- 
deed, half maddens its ; even as a sense of heteroge- 
neousness and confusion among a multiplicity of 
co-existent things tends, in its turn, to throw the 
mind into almost the same confusion as the ob- 
jects themselves. So, on the contrary, -a sense of 
coherence and natural order in the succession of 
events and ideas, or a sense of systematic ar- 
rangement and fitness among co-existent objects, 
inordinately delights us ; and it does so simply by 
removing the distress of mind which is necessarily 
consequent upon the opposite impression. What 
tidiness is among housewives, classification is 
among philosophers : the mere orderly arrange- 
ment of things. A large part of natural science 
consists merely in grouping objects together into 
genera and species, orders and varieties ; and 
these are merely so many separate pigeon-holes, 
as it were, for the convenient sorting of the 
' notes ' of the brain, so that one may be able to 
lay hold of any missing memorandum in a mi- 
nute. By these means the mental and natural 
chaos of the world to ignorant eyes, is brought 
into something like the order that the Almighty 
has impressed upon creation ; and the mind 
enabled to look down, almost from the very 
altitude of heaven itself, and take something like 
an angel's broad view of the universe and its infinite 
variety of phenomena. And it is the vast com- 
prehension and clear-sightedness, that the mind 
thus obtains from philosophic teachings, which 
serve to give the highest mental satisfaction to 
the student. By this means the very rocks- 
and stones have been, as it were, numbered and 
labelled ; every beast in the field and forest, 
every bird, and, indeed, every tiny insect in the 
air, and among the grass ; every fish, ay, and 



THE NEXT TURNING. 279 

almost every animalcule in the water, lias "been 
studied and allotted its due place in creation ; 
every flower in the hedgerow, too, in the garden, 
in the desert, and on the mountain-top ; every 
tree, shrub, and herb on the earth, down even 
to every little piece of moss and weed on the 
rocks and ruins ; every shell upon the shore ; ■ 
every little star in the sky ; every lump of matter 
in the world ; every crystal form found in the 
caves ; every bit of metal in the mines ; every gas 
in the atmosphere ; every colour, every hue, and 
every form ; every bend and motion of the light ; 
every force and power at work in the universe ; 
every country, every sea, and almost every river, 
mountain, and town, over the whole globe ; every 
bone, muscle, blood-vessel, nerve, gland, and organ 
throughout the body, ay, and almost every feel- 
ing and faculty that there is in the mind, — have all 
been noted, scanned, described, and duly mapped 
out ; and that so lucidly, that the intellect can see 
with an eagle glance, as it soars high into the air, 
the whole of the world, the whole of life, ay, and 
almost the whole of the universe at once. Is or is 
this all : the very order of events themselves, the 
secret machinery and almost mainspring of the 
movements of the planets, and our own earth 
and moon, have all been laid bare ; and the endless 
chapter of accidents of which life and nature appear 
to the vulgar to be composed, have been shown to 
be part of one mighty system, where all is harmony 
and proportion, law and order ; and where the 
music of the spheres is but the resonance of the 
universal concord of things — the very breath of 
heaven, breathing a fine suggestive sweetness into 
the thrilling chords of K attire's grand JEolian - 
harp." 



280 YOUJSTG BENJAMIN FEANKLIX. 



THE PLEASURES OF 3IEXTAL HABITS. 

" And now, uncle," said tiie boy, as his god- 
father paused once more on coming to the end of 
the subject, " you've got only the pleasure of 
mental habit to explain — haven't you ?" 

The old man answered, ' ; Yes, lad! that 
follows next, certainly ; but after that, there will 
still be the pleasures that proceed from our per- 
ception of artistic power, both in man and the 
great Creator of all things. Now, my little fellow, 
do you remember what I told you was the special 
function of habit — let me hear ?" 

" Oh, yes, uncle!" spoke out the boy, as he 
turned round and looked his godfather full in the 
face, smiling the while with the simple pride of 
his heart at the knowledge he felt within him ; 
" you said habit rendered that which it was at 
first irksome to do, pleasurable after a time to 
perform, and you said, too " 

' 'That will do, good fellow," interrupted the 
tutor, with a pressure on the boy's plump palm 
that whispered a volume of fine pleasant things 
into his heart ; " that is sufficient for us to bear in 
mind at present — except, indeed, you should re- 
collect also, what I told you at the time, was the 
wondrous character of the change wrought by 
habit. You should remember that the mere con- 
tinued repetition of an act can render it — however 
difficult and distasteful at first — easy and congenial 
to us at last ; that it can transform pain into plea- 
sure, labour into comparative pastime, and give to 
the most arduous voluntary actions all the sim- 
plicity and insensibility of mere clockwork." 

t; I remember it well, unky dear," added young 
Ben. 

"Well then, lad," proceeded thQ old man, 



THE NEXT 1TRXIXG. 2S1 

"what we have now to consider, is the mental 
pleasure that we derive from the mere principle 
of repetition, of which habit — or the propensity to 

repeat — is the special consequence. The first 
distinctive mark of the repetitive principle, then, 
is its sedative influence on the system : that is to 
say, its power to allay, or rather to deaden the 
pain or uneasiness connected with any violent 
or unusual exertion. Even the most agreeable 
impression continually iterated and reiterated, for a 
certain length of time, eventually palls upon us ; for 
the pleasure connected with it becomes gradually 
weaker and weaker with the continued repetition, 
and ultimately passes, by fine and almost insensible 
degrees, into disgust and tedium : while it occa- 
sionally finishes by being absolutely overpowering 
in its offensiveness to the surfeited nature. This 
is the case, not only with the sweets, that to a 
child's palate are morsels of solid melting delight, 
yet gross sickly stuff to the more mature and refined 
taste of manhood ; but it is the same also (as I before 
pointed out to you) with what is called ' mono- 
tony.' For. no matter how intrinsically beautiful 
the thing iterated may appear at first to the mind, 
the continued reiteration of it is sure, sooner or 
later, to produce tedium and weariness ; and that 
even until the mind feels the same fatigue, almost 
as the body does after long exercise, and the same 
disposition to lapse into that slighter form of mental 
coma — that soft swoon of the tired senses, from 
which the patient can be roused with comparatively 
little difficulty, and which is commonly denomi- 
nated ' sleep.' Hence the sedative effect of certain 
continuously-recurrent sounds in nature : the 
murmur of the brooks, for instance, the throb of the 
water wheel, and the lullaby of the mother; and 
hence the means of producing sleep artificially are 
all made to depend upon the lulling power of the 



Zb'J, YOUXG. BENJAMIN FKANKLIX 

continued repetition of the same idea ; such as- 
fancying one sees a flock of sheep going through a 
gate, one after another ; or imagining oneself to 
be counting some hundreds of nails successively,* 
Now the sense of pleasure and ease, which the 
mind obtains from this same principle of mere 
repetition, appears to lie at the base of a consider- 
able number of our purest mental delights. There 
must surely be an innate gratification in the 
simple recognition of an object ; else why the 
special charm of an old familiar face, or even an 
old familiar tree, or of that group of old familiar 
objects which makes up the happy integrity of 
some old familiar haunt? Granted every such 
object is mantled with green associations, as thickly 
as the old church with its clustering ivy ; and 
that the sight of them revives some bright and 
lovely memory, one after another, till the brain 
buzzes with the golden bits of life, like to a hive 
of bees ; and granted, too, that this mere move- 
ment of the associations in the mind is, as I said 
before, sufficient to account for a large portion 
of the mental delight felt under such circum- 
stances. Still, that the simple recognition of 
the old things and places has a charm of its own, 
apart from any pleasure associated with the 
objects themselves, is proved by the attraction 
that the mere repetitive processes of art have for 
even the commonest minds. This is shown in 
the delight the vulgar feel in mere imitation — in 
the shadow of the rabbit on the wall, in which 

* The sleep induced by what is called " Mesmerism," or 
"Animal Magnetism," or "Electro-Biology," may also be 
cited as an instance of the comatose tendency of the 'long* 
persistence of one and the same object before the mind. The 
hypnotic " fluid," which is supposed to pass from the agent to 
the patient, under such circumstances may be extracted 
from a prosy book — a dull sermon — a boring lecture — et id 
genus omne. 



THE XEXT TURNING. 283 

the baby itself finds pleasure ; in mimicry of 

manners and tones — in pictorial representations 
of ' still life ' — in ( striking likenesses ' — in perfect 
copies of any kind, or models — and even in the 
continnally-recnrring chorus to a song, as well as 
the impressive burden of some plaintive ballad, 
or the perpetually reiterated ' gag-words ' of the 
mummers on the stage. Again, we all know how 
intense a pleasure there is in the repetition of a 
favourite air, and how the people of some countries- 
are stirred, to the very depths of their souls, on 
hearing some pet piece of their national music,, 
when far away from their home and fatherland. 
Indeed, the mere enforced repetition of a word, in 
literary or poetical composition, can often lend in- 
tense beauty to a passage.* 

* But not only is the repetition of tlie same word when 
finely worked, so as to enforce some one idea upon the 
mind, a source of great intellectual delight, but even the re- 
petition of the same initial letter, when it is used as a means 
of linking together, or giving the fancy some faint notion of 
resemblance between ideas that are diametrically opposed, 
has a small charm appertaining to it. Pope, who perhaps 
was the greatest poetic artist the world ever saw, and that 
without even a twinkle of high poetic genius in his composi- 
tion, often made fine use of this alliterative trick, e. g., he 
says, 

* But thousands die, without this or that, 
Die and endow a college, or a cat." 

Further, hi his 'Imitations of Horace,' the same author 
says : — 

" Fill but his purse, our poet's work is clone, 
Alike to him, by pathos or by pun." 

In another place ('Moral Essays') he treats us to the 
following couplet : — 

u Or her whose life the church and scandal share, 
For ever in a passion, or a prayer." 
However, in ■ The Bape of the Lock,' he describes the 
apparatus of Belinda's toilet in one neat alliterative line, as — 
*' Putts, powders, patches — bibles, billet-doux." 



284 YOUNG BENJAMIN" FRANKLIN. 

" ' If it were done, when 'tis clone, then 'twere well 
It were done quickly,' 

«ays Macbeth, with a fine ring upon the doing of 
the deed that appalls and absorbs his whole soul. 
Further, what exquisite pathos and tragic power 



So again in the Nursery Ehymes, the alliterative process 
is used as a means of tickling the brain even of children them- 
selves, as in " Peter Piper picked a peck of pepper," and 
*' Roderick Random rode a raw-boned racer," &c. Further, 
entire poems— poems of hundreds of lines in length — have 
been written in which the feat has been to make each word 
begin with the same initial letter. The old ' Paint par/tens,' 
iind ' Pugna Porcorum ' are curious instances of this :— 

" Plaudite Pr ocelli, Porcorum pigra propago 
Progreditur, plures Porci pinguedine pleni 
Pugnantes pergunt, pecudum pars prodigiosa 
Perturbat pede petrosas pierunique plateas, 
Pars portentosa populorum prata prophanat 
Pars pungit populando potens, pars plurima plagis 
Prastendit punire pares, prosternere parvos," 
&c f &c. &c. 

"Pugna Porcorum, 
11 Per P. Portium Poetam, 1690: > 

Again, Anagrams and Acrostics are other curious examples 
ef the simple mental delights that can be associated even with 
mere letters themselves in literary art. In anagrams, how- 
ever, where the letters of the original word are so transposed 
as to express some idea that is intimately connected with 
the subject, the mind is occasionally thrown into a form of 
wonder at the extraordinary character of the apposition, 
and set speculating upon what the old philosophers called, 
fue " universal fitness of things :" and this adds greatly to 
the literal pleasure itself. As, for example, when we find 
that the letters in the name of Horatio Nelson admit of being 
transposed into the words, " Honor est a JVYZo," the secondary 
idea is so strangely apt, that it. strikes the mind that it must 
have been foreseen, even from the very invention of the 
alphabet itself. Again, there are many literal enigmas that 
have a fine artistic charm with them. The one on the letter 
h, which is generally attributed to Lord Byron, is perhaps 
fiie genius of this kind of mental turnery — this intellectual 
ingenuity which seems so akin to nice handiwork that one 
is led to fancy it depends upon the very ringers of the brain — 



THE NEXT TURNING. 285 

is produced by the same high artistic use of the 
same simple means, after the murder in this play 
has been committed ! 

"'One cried, God bless us! (says Macbeth) and, Amen, the 

other ; 
As they had seen me with these hangman's hands. 
Listening their 'fear— I could not say, Amen, 
When they did say, God bless us.' 

And the great Master then goes on to give us a 
wonderfully touching and grand sense of the 
incessant haunting of the guilty conscience. Now 
mark, Ben, in the passage I am going to quote 
to you, with what fine force, owing to its continued 
recurrence, the term sleep seems to strike upon the 
ear, and to keep ringing in the mind, as solemnly 
as a tolling-bell. 

" ' Methought, I heard a voice cry, Sleep no more ! 
Macbeth does murder sleep, the innocent sleep ; 
Sleep, that knits up the ravell'd sleave of care, 
The death of each day's life, sore labour's bath, 
Balm of hurt minds, great Nature's secoDd course^ 
Chief nourisher in life's feast. 

' Lady Macbeth. What do you mean ? 

'Macbeth. Still it cried, Sleep no more ! to all the house ; 
Glamis hath murder 'd sleep, and therefore Cawdor 
Shall sleep no more, Macbeth shall sleep no more !' 

" There is not perhaps a grander instance of 
poetic and tragic power to be found in the litera- 
ture of any age or any country, than this, lad," 
added Uncle Benjamin. " The sleeplessness of 
the murderer is here enforced in so masterly and 



some delicate cerebral touch as it were, rather than the 
vigorous grasp of true intellectual force. 

" 'Twas whispered in Heaven, 'twas muttered in Hell, 
And echo caught faintly the sound as it fell. 
On the confines of eart7t 'twas permitted to rest, 
And the depths of the ocean its presence confess'd. 
"Twill be found in the sp7iere when 'tis riven asunder ; 
"lis seen in the lig/itning, and heard in the t7iimder." 
&e. &c. &c. 



286 YOUXG BEXJAMIN FEAXKLIX. 

vigorous a manner — and there is such a fine super- 
natural and ghostly tone given to the words with 
which the murderer's brain is ringing — together 
with a dash of such exquisite beauty to relieve it, 
in the lovely images of the continually-recurring 
sleep ! sleep ! — that it becomes at once as touching 
and terrible a passage as was ever penned by 
human hand." 

The uncle had been so rapt in the beauty of his 
favourite author, that he was obliged to reflect for 
a minute, as to " whereabouts he was," before he 
could take up the thread of his argument. " Oh, 
yes, I remember," he exclaimed, half to himself. 
44 I was pointing out to you, lad, the delight we 
experience from the mere repetition of the same 
impressions upon our minds. Well, Ben," he went 
on, as cheerily as ever, " it is the mere pleasure of 
recognizing the same quality or thing under dif- 
ferent circumstances, that makes us find such a 
opecial charm in the perception of resemblances ; 
either in poetic figures or scientific analogies, 
or even the fables and allegories of literature, and 
the parables of Scripture. In the vivid state of 
astonishment, you know, we are struck by the 
same thing appearing to us under widely different 
circumstances, or in association with something 
that is diametrically, opposite from what we ex- 
pected ; so that the perception of the marked dif- 
ference seizes and impresses itself upon the mind 
with all the vividness of an emotion. In the per- 
ception of resemblances, on the contrary, it is not 
the unexpected difference of the association with 
one and the same object, but the perception of an 
unexpected resemblance between two different ob- 
jects ; the detection of one and the same quality 
inhering in two things that were utterly distinct 
in our minds ; the discovery of a point of unity 
where there is apparently such utter variety, that 



THE NEXT TURXIXG. 287 

fastens itself upon us with such force and startling 
beauty. Take for instance," said Uncle Benjamin, 
after a moment's consideration, " Shakspeare's 
lovely figure of early morning peeping over the 
hills, as given in the line 

" 'Jocund day stands tiptoe on the misty mountain-top/ 

What a fine bit of painting is this, and what ex- 
quisite delight bursts upon the brain with the per- 
ception of the analogy ! Still, I must quote to 
you, lad, the sweetest simile that is to be found 
throughout the entire range of poetry, and which 
gives us the most graceful conception of unity in 
diversity, that was ever achieved by art. Mark, 
too, how beautifully the idea of oneness in two dis- 
tinct beings is enforced by the continued echo of 
the word. 

" ' 0, and is all forgot ?' 

(says Helena, in the Midsummer Night's Dream,) 

' We, Hermia 

Have with our neelds created both one flower, 
Both on one sampler, sitting- on one cushion, 
Both warbling of one song, both in one key. 
As if our hands, our sides, voices, and minds, 
Had been incorporate. So we grew together, 
Like to a double cherry, seeming parted ; 
But yet a union in 'partition, 
Two lovely berries moulded on one stem; 
So, with two seeming bodies, but one heart/ 

"Moreover, it is this perception of agreement 
between two different notes — the felt union of the 
vibrations, at frequent and regular intervals, be- 
tween two musical sounds beating different times 
— which makes up the delightful perception of 
musical harmony : even as proportion among num- 
bers is but the same perception of agreement 
between the different ratios ; the expression 2 : 4* 
: : 6 : 12, for instance, signifies merely that four 
is double two, and twelve double six : or rather 



288 YOUNG BENJAMIN FRANKLIN. 

that the same multiple (2) is common to each of 
the two ratios. Again, order among a number of 
co-existent objects is merely the perception of a 
certain agreement about their arrangement ; or, 
in other words, a sense of uniformity as to 
different positions they occupy ; and this may be 
either the order of regular intervals, regular 
lines, regular figures, or of what is called con- 
gruity, that is to say, of that fit and proper 
collocation which belongs to natural or con- 
venient association. And so, in the succession 
of events, it is but the same perception of 
agreement in the sequence of different pheno- 
mena; that constitutes what is called the order of 
nature ; for even the perception of cause and 
effect itself, so far as the natural beauty of the 
idea is concerned, is but the mental conviction 
we feel, that the sequence of the two distinct 
events will be the same to the end of all time a 
Further, it is the like faculty of perceiving the 
analogies of things, that gives us our sense of law 
in nature, and which confers upon us that power 
of generalization in science which is the high- 
minded equivalent of idealization in art; that 
power of typification rather than individualization, 
or realization, as it is termed (for the latter belongs 
to the imitative and reproducing form of talent 
rather than the creative faculty) ; that inward 
referring of all things to the spiritual ' form ' that 
exists in the imagination ; that mental regarding of 
the particular thing or event, not as a disjointed or 
disconnected and isolated individual body, but as 
part of a vast and grand whole — a single thread 
unravelled from a mighty network ; a little frag- 
ment, let us add, out of the great kaleidoscope, 
which, if we will but twist and turn it over and 
over with the rest, is sure to tumble into the most 
perfect form — the choicest symmetry. Indeed," 



THE NEXT TURNING, 982 

the old man proceeded, " it is this perception, 
lad, of uniformity in variety, — this simplification 
of complexity — this sense of universal oneness 
pervading even universal infinity itself — which 
enables the mind almost to comprehend the in- 
comprehensible. It is, as it were, the one indivi- 
sible and unalterable soul, giving the sense of 
identity and perpetual unity, amid all the changes 
of years, to the entire body of the universe. The 
faculty of comprehension enables us to grasp — even 
in the narrow compass of our nutshell skulls — the 
endless expanse of the universe itself, and to stow 
away, within the tiny honeycomb cells of our 
brains, all the infinite variety of worlds beyond 
our own, and all the same infinite variety of dif- 
ferent objects, elements, forces, and forms of life 
and beauty, that make up the vast complex globe 
on which we live. Then, as if the very conference 
of this wondrous power on our souls was not suffi- 
cient bounty, the Almighty has superadded the 
mighty sense to enjoy it, and to feel the exquisite 
mental delight that has been made to spring from 
the use of the faculty itself — to find delight in that 
wondrous and delicious state of ease and rest, of 
satisfaction, contentment, ay, and thankfulness, 
which laps the spirit in a perfect waking trance 
of admiration. 

"But though the faculty of comprehension can 
do this for us, the faculty of analogy, or the percep- 
tion of uniformity in variety, in no way lags be- 
hind. It is this which is the mental sunshine of 
the world — for it is not alone the light, but the 
very beaut} r of the brain ; this which puts together 
the disjointed fragments of the great puzzle, and 
makes a lovely picture of it after all ; this which 
tunes the jarring strings of the instrument into 
the grandest harmony; this which blends the 

the 
v 



290 YOUNG BEXJAMIN FRANKLIK. 

earth into a rainbow ring, where the greatest di- 
versity melts by insensible degrees in the sweetest 
unity; this which sets the house in order, and de- 
corates it with its choicest ornaments ; this which 
is the golden thread of light stretching from heaven 
to earth, and uniting the world of wonder in a water 
drop even with the world of wonder in the stars ; 
this which wreathes the straggling wild-flowers 
of seeming accidents into a cunning garland of 
exquisite design ; this which gives the fine touch 
of nature that makes the whole world kin, and links 
all men, nations, and races, into one band of 
brotherhood, hand joined to hand, till the globe it- 
self is circled with the human chain : this, in fine, 
which makes the charm of all reason, the delight 
of all poetry, the grace of all philanthropy, the 
glory of all chivalry, the dignity of all art, and, 
indeed, the very beauty of all the beauty that en- 
compasses the world." 

THE PLEASURES OF ART. 

64 The pleasure produced by works of art comes 
now, I think you said," observed the youth as he 
found his uncle pause for a minute or two. 

" It does, Ben ; and to understand this we must 
revert for a short while to the special qualities of 
the sense of effort," replied the old man. " You 
remember, my boy, that I told you effort was 
mostly irksome, and occasionally painful ; whilst, 
if long sustained, it was fatiguing, and ultimately 
overpowering ; for effort means that violent or labo- 
rious exertion of our powers which is necessary to 
master some heavy task, or overcome some great 
difficulty. The moderate exercise of the power 
within us is, however, by no means disagreeable 
to us ; as, indeed, we have seen, in the simple 
pleasure derived from gentle physical exercise it- 



THE NEXT TURNING. 291 

self. There is assuredly an innate delight in 
making onr muscles answer, as they do, imme- 
diately to the dictates of onr will — the same kind 
of delight as you find, Master Ben, in making a 
boat answer readily to its helm, or a steed to the 
bridle ; and this inherent gratification can often 
be noted in the smiles of a baby, as it begins to learn 
the use of its tiny hands, and in the little peals of 
hearty laughter that burst out when it begins to 
find it can toddle a few paces alone. It is this 
delight in one's power, too, which makes up the 
large human pleasure of success ; though success 
itself is so often connected with the attainment of 
some worldly good, that the simple charm of suc- 
ceeding is generally inflamed into an exulting 
emotion of joy at our own worldly prosperity. 
Nevertheless, our sporting friend could have told 
you, lad, the pleasure there is to be found in 
merely hitting the mark one aims at ; in sending 
an arrow pat into the bull's-eye ; in throwing a 
penny piece into the air, and striking it with a 
bullet as it falls ; in snuffing a candle with a 
duelling-pistol ; in walking along particular cracks 
in the pavement, or balancing a straw upon the 
nose — or even in mastering the slightest possible 
difficulty. It is the simple stimulus of gain- 
ing such poor triumphs as these that stirs people 
to take to practising the arduous physical feats 
indulged in by your tight-rope dancers, posturers,. 
equilibrists, circus-riders, sleight-of-hand men, 
and so on ; and this also which makes the 
vulgar find such intense delight in the exhibition 
of such feats of bodily agility. Indeed, every 
one is charmed with any work of ; skill ' or 
subtlety — either of fingers, limbs, or brain : for 
we are pleased, not only with the exercise of our 
own power, but even with the display of power 
in others. Nevertheless, to be impressed with 



292 YOUNG BENJAMIN FRANKLIN. 

the full force of this kind of enjoyment, two 
things are essential : — one is, that we should have 
a perfect sense of the difficulty of the task ; and 
the other, of comparative ease in accomplishing 
it. If there be no sense of difficulty, of course 
there will be no sense of power in the mastering 
of it ; for it is merely the opposing force without 
that makes us conscious of the action of the 
force within. Indeed, it is this feeling of opposi- 
tion from without, which gives us our sense of 
effort itself. But this sense of effort — this sense 
which is made up of the double consciousness of 
hard external resistance to our will, and of strenu- 
ous internal exertion and determination to crush 
the obstacle to our wishes — is by no means an agree- 
able feeling, or one that consorts with our nature ; 
nay, it is obvious that it must be antagonistic to it. 
Hence the enjoyment we derive from the exercise 
of power lies, not in the act of overcoming the diffi- 
culties, but in the fact of their being overcome ; 
and therefore, the easier the work is done, that is 
to say, the greater the work which has been done, 
:and the less sense of labour we have in the doing 
of it, the greater the enjoyment we experience 
regarding it. This is the reason why a sketch is 
often more beautiful to us than a highly-finished 
miniature or elaborate Dutch painting ; for, in the 
one the effect is often gained by one bold stroke, 
as it were ; whilst in the other, we can see the 
million finnikin touches that have been niggled 
into it. It is this sense of ease, combined with 
power, that makes freedom of execution always so 
pleasant ; even as it is the opposite idea of fatigue 
that renders elaboration so disagreeable to us : 
as well as the performances of posture-masters and 
tight-rope dancers so unpleasant to refined natures, 
owing to the sense of painfulness or danger that they 
force upon us. Do you understand, my little man ?" 



THE NEXT TURNING. 293 

" I think I can, a bit," was the diffident reply. 
" But, uncle, what has this to do with the plea- 
sure we get from looking at works of art ? There 
isn't any power wanted for art, is there ? for 
I'm sure the artist we saw was a weak little 
man enough." 

" The meaning of the word art, my dear boy, is 
simply power ; even as an hi-e rt man means a man 
without power or energy," answered the tutor. 

"But I thought art meant cunning," urged 
young Ben. 

The uncle replied, " And so it does ; like craft, 
which, however, signifies literally creation or 
sagacity.* But cunning, my lad, is simply 
kenning, or knowing ; and knowledge is power — in- 
tellectual power — the power within us ; the innate 
power of our souls and will, made to act through 
the muscles of our mind, rather than through 
those of our body. The muscles are merely the 
instruments with which we work — the visible and 
palpable tools we employ to overcome some phy- 
sical difficulty ; whilst the intellect, the imagina- 
tion, the wit, the reason, — are the invisible and 
impalpable weapons with which we conquer mental 
obstacles." 

" Oh, I see now," murmured Ben. 

"Well then, lad, to appreciate — to thoroughly 
and fully enjoy any work of high art," the god- 
father went on, u we must be conscious of the 
inordinate power of the artist : that is to say, we 
must feel at once the inordinate difficulty of doing 

* The Saxon word Crpefi signified power, force, intelli- 
gence. The Germans, Swedes, and Danes have the same 
word, written Kraft, and meaning power, strength, or energy. 
The British equivalent for this is Grev, strong, and this is 
connected with the Welsh verb Creu, to create (Lat. Creo , 
and with Crafu, to hold, comprehend, perceive; whence 
Crafus, sagacious, of quick perception. 



294 YOUNG BENJAMIN FRANKLIN. 

sucli work, and the inordinate ease with, which 
the work has been done." 

" But how can I feel all this, uncle, if I don't 
know what the difficulty was that the artist had 
to get over, and whether he did the work readily 
or not," argued the pupil. 

" Of course you can't feel it, if you have no 
knowledge of the matter, Ben ; and if you are in- 
sensible to the high art of the artist, of course you 
can't expect to have any high enjoyment from his 
works;" such was the simple reply. "It- is the 
same with the vulgar, my little man — and there 
are vulgar rich, remember, as well as vulgar poor 
— they are utterly dead and numb to one of the 
purest, sweetest, and cheapest delights of human 
life, and that simply because they have no sense 
of art or artist in the great artistic works of 
the world. To them a gallery of fine paintings 
is merely a collection of pretty eye-toys, and it 
delights them about as much as a child is delighted 
with the pictures of a magic-lantern ; a fine work 
of fiction is to them nothing more than a pleasant 
dream ; a fine poem, simply a mellifluent succes- 
sion of pretty images and flowery figures ; and a 
fine piece of music, a mere agreeable tickling of 
the tympanum. Such folk have no more elevated 
gratification from the contemplation of works of 
art, than they have from the taste of a dainty dish 
set before them. They see the canvas only, Ben, 
and not the artist at the back of it; they look 
upon the bright bits of nature, without any sense 
of the God that created them ; and hence the 
tendency of all art, with low artists who work to 
please the vulgar, is to sink into mere pretty 
subjects* With the higher craftsmen, however, 

* This subject-painting, rather than art-painting, is the 
great pictorial vice of the day, and a signal evidence of 
mediocrity in the painters who resort to it. Of course, if a 



THE NEXT TURXIXG. 295 

prettiness of subject obtains little or no consider- 
ation. The artistry of a thing — that is to say, its 



man have not innate power enough to impress others with that 
admiration of his genius which makes up the true art-reve- 
rence, he must adopt some extrinsic method of producing an 
effect — seeing that he has no intrinsic merit of his own 
whereby to compass it. A tricky subject is chosen merely 
as the means of hiding impotent art. When a painter finds 
he cannot paint to please the choice critical few who demand 
the display of something like power in a picture, why then 
he begins to paint to please the vulgar, purblind many, who 
have no sense of artistic power even when it is set before 
them, and to whom a picture is only a picture. 

"A primrose by the river's brim, 
A yellow primrose was to him, 
And it was nothing more/' 

It is the same with the poiuerful subjects of the French 
school. Details that are naturally disgusting, of course 
stir the soul more or less on being contemplated : and the 
emotion thus produced by the mere natural action of the 
disgusting details themselves, the indiscriminate mind fancies 
to have proceeded from the power of the artist himself; where- 
as, such subjects as are naturally "powerful " and "stirring " 
are a sure sign of weakness in the man who selects them. 
Depend upon it, the individual who has, and feels he has, 
the true artist power within himself, always strives to bring 
the power of his picture out of himself and hates to produce 
a " powerful " effect by resorting to subjects that are " power- 
ful " per ipsa. The trickster, however, who has no capital to 
trade upon must get credit by hook or by crook ; and if he 
cannot have what he wants, by honest means, out of the ex- 
perienced and knowing, why he must, perforce, fly to the 
"yokels," and obtain his fame under false pretences. As 
examples of this tawdry, trumpery, loathsome, canting, snivel- 
ling, drivelling, " stirring," " charming," " elevating," " re- 
fining," teachy, preachy, inert kind of art, we may remind 
the reader of the band of abbey singing-boys in night-gowns, 
represented as bawling, "We praise thee, O Lord." Then 
there is the sublime bit of devotion in false colours, called 
"Keadixg the Scriptures," where we have a Quaker and 
his wife seated at a loo table, on which is an outspread Bible 
and a glaring sinumbral lamp ! " The eleventh hour " is 
another specimen of the modern Cantesque style of painting. 
Then there is also the Sentiraentesque school of art, dono 



296 YOUNG BENJAMIN FRANKLIN. 

fitness for displaying the peculiar power of the 
artist — is sufficient for them ; and hence even 



to please the young ladies and their dear mammas ; such as 
we find in the sea pieces of " Mr Child ! Mr Child," and its 
"lovely companion," entitled, " They're saved! they're 
saved!" and also "The Wanderer's Return." The last, 
however, is really too rich, as an illustration of the snivelling, 
drivelling school of painting, to pass by with merely a cursory 
notice. This picture consists of a weeping young lady on her 
knees in a churchyard beside a mound of earth, at the head of 
which is a gravestone inscribed as follows : " Sacred to the 
Memory of SARAH, the beloved wife of the REV. 
HABBAKUK BELL, many years rector of this parish,'* 
&c. &c. ; so that by this clever and delicate stroke of sug- 
gestive art, we are made to understand that the pretty young 
lady on her knees, with her bonnet half off, and a tear-drop on 
her cheek as big as the pendant to a French fish-woman's 
earrings (in order to give us a double idea of the intense 
mental anguish of the poor dear), is Miss Rosa Matilda Bell 
herself. Then we are further let into the pictorial secret by 
means of a bouncing babby — which Miss R. M. Bell has, in 
the fury of her grief apparently, thrown headlong (poor thing !) 
upon the ground beside her — that this same young lady is not 
only Miss Bell of the bouncing tear-drop, but Miss Bell of the . 
bouncing babby too ; and that she is no less a person than the 
"Wanderer " to whom the picture refers. Now the artist, in 
true parsonic style, having divided his pictorial text into 
three words, and illustrated two of them, proceeds in due 
form to — "thirdly, and lastly" — illustrate the final word of 
the "title," viz., to make out the return. This is achieved 
also in the highest style of true Sentimentesque painting. 
In the background of the picture is shown the open church- 
yard gate, with the path leading to the darling old ivied 
rectory in the distance ; and down this pathway we see an 
elderly clerical-looking gentleman, with long silver hair, 
and apparently a touch of gout in his left leg, coming along, 
with his head bent and his eyes shut, as if he were about to 
say "grace before dinner ;" and whom we no sooner set eyes 
upon than we feel satisfied, though we never saw the rev. 
gentleman before in all our lives (and never wish to do so 
again, we may add aside), that it is no less a person than the 
Rev. Habbakuk Bell himself; for the black hatband so 
dexterously thrown round his broad brim tells us, or' rather 
let us say hints to us, in the most subtle and poetic manner, 
that the rev. gentleman is free to indulge in a second 



THE NEXT TURNING. 297 

ugliness itself is often selected as the material to 
be adorned by them ; for, in the fairy -work of true 



marriage Bell if he please ; and that " Sarah, the beloved," 
whose virtues are recorded on the tombstone that sticks up, 
like a sign-post, right in the front of the picture, "was his be- 
loved Sarah. Nor is this all : accompanying the disconsolate 
and gouty Kev. H. Bell (" many years rector of this parish "), 
is a young lady whom the same pictorial instinct assures us, 
directly we see her, is another of " them blessed Bells," as 
the servants say ; and that she has discovered her naughty 
sister Eosey in the churchyard, and induced the silver hair- 
Bell to hobble down there and forgive her : now that she has 
"returned — " after an absence of eleven months at least. 

Now this is the worst possible style of art — this, we repeat, 
snivelling, drivelling, loathsome, canting, stirring, charming, 
elevating, " refining, : ' preachy, teachy style as it is; and 
compared with which the fine honest old tea-board school 
is a manly achievement. Belonging to this class again, are 
the '• pretty-story 1 ' pairs of prints, such as " The Departure," 
and " The Return ;" as well as "Going with the Stream, 1 ' 
and " Going against the Stream."' Under the same trashy 
category, too, must be named "The Heart's Misgivings," 
and the " Last Appeal,'" and " Cross Purposes," etid genus 
omne. Such pictures again as " Waiting for the Verdict,* 3 
and your "Ramsgate Sands," and "Derby Days," and 
" Found Drowned," are no more painting than reporting 
all the minute incidents of Her Majesty's trip to Scotland 
is either a poem, a drama, or a romance. Again, the 
"profound" touches of other artists belong to the same 
kind of trick-art ; such as Holman Hunt's cut apple lying 
in the foreground, which is shown to be rotten at the core, 
(how subtle !) ; and Herbert's " Christ in the Carpenter's 
Shop," with the fallen planks arranged in the form of a 
cross at his feet (how suggestive !)— all which we are told 
is so "wonderfully deep/' Such clap -trap stuff as this 
has no more right to rank with the achievements of high 
art, than has one of Tom Hood's rude sketches, where the 
pencil was always made to convey an idea of some sort ; 
ay, and oftener a much more cunning idea than such mere 
surface tricks as those above described. How different was 
it with the really grand men of former times ! In Rubens' 
"Descent prom the Cross," for instance, that we see at 
Antwerp Cathedral, there is no petty artifice to give us a 
show of profound thinking, but only a display of profound 
picturesque perception, and profound power and grace in 



298 YOUNG BENJAMIN FRANKLIN. 

art, the Beauty can be wed to the Beast, and yet 
none feel offended at the marriage. Take the works 



rendering it. The man straining over the top of the cross, 
with the end of the winding-sheet between his teeth, as he 
helps to lower the dead body from above — the huddled form 
of the calm and dignified corpse itself — and the soldier on 
the ladder assisting to support the heavy, powerless limbs ; 
these are all given with such intrinsic force, and such utter 
absence of extrinsic trick, while the "powerful" details, 
that in the hands of a poor painter would have been ex- 
aggerated to loathsomeness, are here so finely subdued and 
veiled, that we feel, the instant we look upon it, we are stand- 
ing in the presence of a mighty artistic mind. So again, 
what wonderful vigour of drawing and portrayal of the 
human form — in a position that it was impossible to have had 
a model to sit for, mark — is exhibited in the " Crucifixion 
or St. Peter" with his head downwards, by the same 
master ! and yet the end is compassed without a touch of 
revolting or " stirring " minutise in the means. Further, 
what subject can be less pretty or even nice than Gerard 
Dow's " Water Doctor " ! and yet, was it the prurience of 
such a subject, think you, that tickled the great Dutch 
artist, or the fine play of light in the beam through the 
window — the lustre of the upheld bottle as the sun falls on 
it — and the wonderful scrutiny in the upturned face of the 
old doctor himself? Such subjects are purely picturesque 
ones, and those who see only the opposite in them have no 
sense of the picturesque in nature, nor any soul for art, 
either in the works of man or God. The same thing may be 
said of Kembrandt's grand picture of " The Dissection." No 
subject could be more innately repulsive, and yet to an artistic 
eye none could be more picturesque, and no painting at the 
same time more forcible and less offensive ; for the details 
that a French artist would have revelled in, and done to 
gangrene, as we have said, are finely kept in the background ; 
the dead recumbent body being thrown a-slant across the 
picture, and half concealed by the figures of the doctors 
grouped in front of it, and the raw muscles of the arm only ex- 
posed to bring out the fine rich contrast of the crimson flesh 
with the black gowns. What is your pre-Eaphaelite pictorial- 
reporting beside such mighty visions as these ? If the paint- 
ing of every particular blade of grass, and making out of the 
several stamina of each little flower in the foreground, and 
giving the peculiar geological texture to all the foremost bits 
of rock : if to be " botanically and geologically true " is the 



THE NEXT TURNING. 299 

of Shakspeare himself: why, tlie mere subjects 
of his finest plays, — ' Macbeth,' ' Othello,' ' Lear,' 



great art-object, way then the wonderful literality and 
texture- work of the photograph must be infinitely finer than 
any landscape ever painted by Turner, Gainsborough, Hob- 
bemer, Poussin, or Salvator Rosa himself. But the fact is, 
this f truth" of detail is no truth at all, but downright 
pictorial falsity. Why, it may be asked, should artists make 
out the separate blades of grass — each flower-stamen, and 
the peculiar rock-granulation in the foreground only? Why 
not in the distance also ? (Do not laugh at the absurdity of 
such a question, but proceed.) The answer, of course, will 
be : the eye could not possibly see distant objects distinctly. 
No more, we add, can it see objects distinctly in the fore- 
ground either, when it is fixed or focussed (for they are opti- 
cally the same things, and metaphysically something more) 
upon the principal object of attention. If a true picture of some 
one scene in Nature is to be painted, rather than a thousand 
and one portraits of the thousand and one minute and in- 
significant details that go to make up such a scene in the 
broad view of the landscape, then every collateral object must 
be toned down to the one on which the eye is meant to rest, and 
where, and where alone (from the very focussing of the eye 
upon it), the great intensity of light and shade, and conse- 
quently the distinct making out of particulars, will be visible. 
Every artist is aware that the great difficulty is to prevent 
making out the forms and colours of known objects in the dis- 
tance ; or, in other words, the difficulty is to paint them as 
they are seen in the general view, rather than as they are 
known to be, when studied by themselves. And so we say 
artists have yet to paint the objects in the foreground as they 
really are seen when viewed in harmony with the principal 
object in the picture ; and not as they are seen and known to 
be, when studied specially and separately. But, as it is, the 
foreground of your pre-Baphaelite pictures is as untrue to 
nature, ay, and as barbarous too, as Chinese backgrounds. 
This portrait-painting of each simple thing in a complex mass ; 
this reduction of all the details of a composite living land- 
scape — that has always a special feeling underlying and 
spiritualizing, as well as substantializing the whole — down to 
the senseless literality of so many distinct items of still life ; 
this giving us a hundred different isolate pictures of a 
hundred different isolate objects, where only one picture of 
one compound object is needed ; this painting of heaven 
knows how many disjointed groups of people in " Kamsgate 



300 YOUNG BENJAMIN" FRANKLIN. 

' Hamlet,' the ' Merchant of Yenice ' — are morally 
revolting, and such as if enacted in the world about 



Sands," for instance, and giving to every one of the mani- 
fold faces making up all the manifold little cliques there, 
each the same marked distinctness of feature and expression 
as the other, and making them out to he all doing and mean- 
ing something apart from the rest (even down to the r^odel 
Italian boy with the model white mice themselves), and then 
calling it a picture of the place, when it is no more one picture 
than is the succession of conjoint *' flats " which make up a 
theatrical diorama — and believing that it is anything like a 
composition, when there is not even the vaguest attempt at 
fusing and interblending the rude and undigested mass or 
perfect chaos of divers and diverse particulars into the broad 
and harmonious entirety of perfect creation ; in fine, this giving 
to accessories and subordinates the same luminous and chro- 
matic importance, the same black and white distinctness of 
detail, and the same delicacy of manipulation and finish— as 
the principal object itself; this servile copying of model legs 
of mutton (as Wilkie used) for pictorial legs of mutton that 
were merely wanted to break up the formality of the rack 
under the ceiling, and which the eye could not possibly have 
seen while looking at the main characters on the ground below; 
— all this, we urge, is another of the crying pictorial vices, and, 
indeed, general artistic vices of the time. And it is one which 
the false doctrine of modern art-preachers is tending to drive 
even further still into the mere literalities of reality ; rather 
than to lead young artists into the ideal beauty of general 
nature as opposed to particular truth. Such false doctrine 
is a mistake, which proceeds from the fundamental mistaking 
of the very nature of truth itself— confounding, as it does, 
that which is mere fact, or mere particular, bare, bald letter- 
truth with law and harmony or order and fitness, which 
is the universal and enlightened spirit-truth of things. It is 
this modern artistic fallacy, and consequent falsity, that makes 
our pictures of the present day (with hardly one really grand 
exception) such gaudy fluttering butterfly bits of colour for 
the eye to look upon, instead of being the fine steadfast and 
satisfying points of visual rest like the grand paintings 
of old. Compare, for instance, the sublime repose and 
harmony of Benibrandfs picture of the " Woman taken in 
Adultery," that one sees at Rotterdam, and the rich clear- 
obscure of its foreground with the pictorial riot, chaos, 
and hard chalkiness'of McClise's " Robin Hood ;" and then 
surely none but the purblind and the tasteless will doubt 



THE NEXT TURNING. SOI 

us now, would stir even the dullard to the highest 
pitch of indignation. And yet, graced by the 
touches of this mighty, masterly hand, the moral 
monstrosity becomes transformed into a high in- 
tellectual beauty ; the natural loathsomeness into 
the finest artificial feast : even as the manure itself 
is changed by the subtlety of mysterious nature 
into food and flowers, or as blood is used in certain 
industrial processes to produce the highest possible 
refinement. So again, I have heard the Dutch- 
men in our town, Ben, say that Bembrandt's great 
picture of the Dissection is a perfect visual ban- 
quet of colour ; and even though it is the most 
repulsive of all subjects, they assure me that the 
eye forgets the mangled corpse upon the canvas, 
and sees only, in the wondrous contrast of the 
crimson hues of the raw muscles of the arm, and 
the yellow, cadaverous complexion of the body, 
contrasted with the black gowns of the doctors 
grouped about it, — the soul of the painter, revel- 
ling in the fine chromatic harmony. The lollipop 
school of art, my boy, is the most sickly and 
childish of all, and tickles the taste of those only 
who admire a picture as they would a paper-hang- 
ing, for being a sightly covering to a blank wall." 

" But, uncle," asked young Ben, who was still 
at a loss to comprehend why so few should be 
able to have a knowledge of art, " how do people 
ever get to be impressed with a sense of this power 
and ease, as you call it, in an artist. They haven't 
seen him doing the work ; and they surely can't 
tell whether he found it hard or easy to do it 
then?" 

"Indeed, Master Ben! Well, let us see," said 

for an instant that our own great artists have for many a 
long year " erred and strayed from their ways like lost sheep ;" 
and, moreover, that the Shepherd of Modern Painters is not 
exactly the man to bring the nock back to the fold. 



302 YOUNG BENJAMIN FRANKLIN. 

the "ancle, in reply. " The strong men yon have 
seen, boy, in the shows at Boston fair, whirl- 
ing hundredweights abont their heads, with the 
same ease as you wonld so many bladders, and 
bending bars of iron as if they were twigs, — you 
knew to be men of great muscular power, because 
you were conscious that you yourself would have 
broken your little back before you could have 
lifted the heavy masses of metal they did ; and 
moreover, because you were eye-witness to the 
comparative ease with which they lifted them ; — 
that is to say, so far as your eye could detect, 
there was no straining to compass the effect, nor 
any ostensible sign of heavy labour in the work. 
Every one is a natural critic of such feats as these, 
my boy, because they know, from their own every- 
day experience, how infinitely the task surpasses 
their own physical powers. And then, if they 
think physical power in man an admirable thing, 
they will admire the mighty strong fellow : they 
will look up to him with a kind of half-reverence 
and half-love, not only because the might that is 
in him is so much greater than their own might, 
but because of the ease, and therefore the com- 
parative grace, with which he accomplishes the 
mightiest tasks." 

"I begin to see what you mean now," mut- 
tered the youth, as he chewed the cud of the pro- 
blem. 

" Well, lad," the other proceeded, " of physical 
feats most people are born critics, because the 
physical power in such matters is often self- 
evident. We all feel and know, almost instinc- 
tively and intuitively, that we couldn't swallow 
sabres, or jump through hoops off a galloping 
horse's back, or dance the Highland fling upon a 
wire some hundred feet high in the air amidst a 
shower of fireworks." 



THE XEXT TURXIXG. 303 

The boy couldn't help smiling at the obvious 
truths of the argument. 

" Again, Benjamin, there are other feats' of 
skill, rather than art, that almost every person 
can appreciate naturally ;" and as the old man 
said the words, the boy turned towards him, eager 
for the illustration. " Almost every one, for 
instance," said Uncle Ben, " can appreciate the 
art or skill of simple imitation. I do not mean 
merely enjoy the resemblance produced (since that 
depends, as I have shown you, on an entirely 
different susceptibility of our nature) ; but I do 
mean that they can have a feeling at the same time 
of greater or less admiration for the person pro- 
ducing the enjoyment; for it is this feeling of 
admiration — this turning of the mind towards the 
human cause of our delight, and having a sense of 
greater or less wonder at his superior power, that 
makes up the feeling of artistry — that is to say, of 
respect, and even reverence, for the artist-power. 
The child, when it perceives the shadow}' like- 
ness of the rabbit on the wall, Ben, and finds out 
that the long black moving ears, and bright white 
eye that .keeps winking at it, are produced by its 
father's fingers, depend upon it, looks into its 
parent's face with a mixture of love and wonder, 
ay, and of awe and worship, as it feels its first 
spasm of admiration, for what it doubtlessly be- 
lieves then to be a work of prodigious craft and 
skill. The misfortune is that half — nay, lad, 
more than three-fourths — of the world, never 
advance in artistic knowledge and sense beyond 
the faculty of that little child, fascinated with the 
wondrous piece of imitation, and thinking that 
work a high artistic effort which is but a mere 
trick of the fingers after all." 

" And how do others acquire a greater know- 
ledge, Uncle Ben ?" inquired his nephew. 



304 YOUNG BENJAMIN FKANKLIN. 

4C Why, boy," the answer ran, " when they 
have had their fill of the various imitative pro- 
cesses in art, and wondered till they have no 
longer any wonder left, for the once-wonderful 
artists who delight in bits of ' still life,' (in the 
painted slice of cheese, for instance, with the 
mouse about to gnaw it, and the jug of foaming 
ale with the crusty loaf behind) — for the musicians 
who excel in the reproduction of the cries of the 
entire farm-yard on the fiddle (the braying of 
the donkey — clucking of the hen — cackling of the 
geese — gobbling of the turkeys, and crowing of 
the cocks) ; — for the ventriloquists who glory in 
conversations with invisible old cellarmen far 
underground, and imaginary bricklayers up chim- 
neys, knocking out imaginary bricks, who delight 
in frying imaginary pancakes, and in sawing 
through imaginary logs, and uncorking and decant- 
ing imaginary bottles of wine ; — when, lad, we 
have been surfeited with these mere tricks and 
antics of human cunning, and found out that the 
powers and processes which we once believed so 
transcendent, because we knew and felt they were 
far beyond what we ourselves could compass at the 
time — are no such very extraordinary powers after 
all ; but that, on the contrary, in the wide range 
of human nature, the faculty for imitation, or the 
simple outside re-presentation of a thing, is one that 
mere ordinary power of mind and manipulation is 
sufficient to compass : when we have made this dis- 
covery, I say, we go on continually widening the 
circle of our experience, and comparing one signal 
evidence of human power with another in each of 
the different arts ; until at last we come to distin- 
guish the giants from the pigmies on stilts — the 
creators from the mere reproducing creatures ; and 
end by regarding those only as high artists who 
display the most inordinate power of conception 



THE NEXT TURNING. 305 

and execution in their works — power that can 
triumph over difficulties that would be overpower- 
ing to ordinary human minds, and yet triumph 
over them with the greatest apparent ease and 
grace. As you knew the power of the strong man 
in the show, Ben, instinctively and intuitively, 
by comparing the exhibition of his power with 
your own power, and also with that of the most 
powerful men with whom you were acquainted, 
and then feeling that he infinitely transcended them 
all ; so with the mental athlete ; directly we are 
conscious of his power — directly we know and feel 
that Ji3 can snap the iron chain of events in nature 
as easily as a silkworm's thread — that he can 
crush the adamantine wall of circumstance hem- 
ming in our lives, as readily as a wren's nest in 
his grasp — that he can make the most rigid and 
inflexible difficulties in his path as supple as the 
stems of harebells — and, indeed, that like Atlas 
himself, he can stir the entire world with the 
force of his mere will, as though it were a soap- 
bubble in the air driven by his breath — directly 
we know and feel all this, we also know and feel 
that we are the little motes, and he the bright and 
sunny beam from heaven, at once stirring and en- 
lightening us." 

"I see! I see!" exclaimed the boy, thought- 
fully, as he inwardly pondered upon the high 
theme. 

" The pleasure we experience, my little man," 
the uncle went on, " in contemplating works of 
high art, arises not only from the intrinsic beauty 
of such works themselves, but from that fine 
enjoyment which springs from the conception of 
the highest power exerted with the greatest ease, ' 
and therefore with the greatest grace ; for high 
art may be defined to be the voluntary exercise 
of high power with little or no effort, — even as 

x 



306 YOUNG- BENJAMIN FRANKLIN. 

the highest art is that sublime exercise of the 
Almighty's power, which makes creation the im- 
mediate consequence of the mere expression of the 
Almighty will. ' And God said, Let there be 
light ; and there was light.' 

" This is the very majesty of all art, Ben. It 
is impossible for the mind to conceive anything 
requiring greater power to achieve, and yet any- 
thing achieved more readily, or more sublime in 
its achievements. The stupendousness and love- 
liness of the work — the flooding of all creation 
in an instant with that pellucid fire-mist, which 
forms the broad-sheet of luminous matter diffused 
throughout the world — the stirring of the entire 
universe with the undulations of the luminous 
ether- waves, from one end of space to the other, 
circling and circling round the central point of 
rest, like the rings in a pool, and flashing light 
everywhere immediately, in response to the great 
Will — immediately, remember ! — without any in- 
tervening event! — without any intermediate work 
or labour to compass the end ! — without any ma- 
chinery ! — without any delay ! — the grand outward 
result following as momentarily upon the inward 
determination, as the passing thought illuminates 
the countenance of man : — this gives us, lad, not 
only a sense of the highest art, but the highest 
sense of art which the human intellect can ever 
hope to comprehend." 

The couple sat silent for a while, looking at the 
broad sheet of silver moonlight spread before 
them — looking at the million star-specks above- 
looking at the lights on the shore, and rapt in the 
great artistic wonder of light itself. 

"The pleasure we derive from the love of art, 
therefore, my boy," resumed Uncle Ben, after a 
time, "is the highest intellectual enjoyment of 
which the mind of man is susceptible. It at once 



THE NEXT TURXIXG. 307 

humiliates and elevates the soul : humiliates it 
with a true sense of its own inferior powers and 
short-comings ; and elevates it also with a sense of 
the perfection and excellence of the artist, who 
has overwhelmed it with admiration. It fills the 
mind with all the glory of the highest conquest — 
the noblest triumph ; not the conquest of man 
over man, but of man over nature : the triumph 
of heroic genius over difficulties. Nor is there 
in the true love of art any envy of rivals, or 
dread of victors ; for those who are made the 
slaves of the conquerors are the most willing of 
all slaves — the most reverent of all children — the 
most loving of all friends. The wonder that it 
begets in the soul is not the wonder of mere 
ignorance, child ; but wonder informed by all the 
enlightenment and beauty contained in the won- 
drous work itself, and made fervent, almost to 
worship, by the sense of perfection and power 
in that which overpowers it. There is no power 
on the earth so mighty, and yet so spiritual — so 
kindly and so noble, as the creative power of 
genius. The world's riches and nobility are 
weak as bubbles beside it ; heroism and martyr- 
dom are alone kin to it in force of soul. What 
if the rich man is able to appropriate a manor 
or a park? — can he appropriate the sunlight and 
the shade — the colour, the form, and expression 
of nature ? He may take a goodly slice of the 
earth to himself, certainly; but he cannot pos- 
sibly buy up the beauty of the landscape ; he 
cannot, with all his riches, arrange so that he 
alone shall enjoy that; for that is God's dowry to 
all who have an eye and a soul for art ; and it is 
only the artistic sense that can thoroughly appre- 
ciate it. What if the noble can have a legion of 
toadeaters to fawn and flatter, fetch and carry for 
him ! cannot the great artist, in every art. have 



Q{j8 ioung benjamin franklin. 

all the intellectual spirits in the world for his 
admiring vassals, and make them at once his very 
slaves and worshippers ? And does the glory of 
a nation, think you, lie in its Euckinghams and 
St. Albans — the pet creatures of a foolish monarch's 
favour ; or in its Shakspeares, Newtons, Bacons, 
Miltons, Lelys, Purcells, and those grand patrician 
souls that got their patents of nobility from the 
Great Creator himself? No, lad : there is no equi- 
valent power in the world to the power of genius, 
unless it be the moral power of the hero and the holy 
power of the martyr ; for these three, indeed, are 
but kindred forms of one insuperable and tran- 
scendent force — force of mind — force of spirit — 
and force of soul. There is the same self-sacrific- 
ing spirit in art as in heroism ; the same sacrifice 
of worldly riches and worldly enjoyment to the 
one absorbing love — the love of the beautiful and 
the grand ; the same bravery of nature shown in the 
artist's sturdy fight for success ; the same prowess 
in carving his way through the host arrayed 
against him, and the same chivalry displayed 
in his ardour to do battle for honour and beauty. 
Nor is true genius deficient on the other hand in 
the fine martyr power to suffer for what it devoutly 
believes and reveres ; to suffer itself to be gib- 
beted by the rest of the world as a madman or 
a prodigal ; to suffer itself to be crucified with 
the scorn of purse-pride and the tyranny of 
worldly authority : and yet amid all to lift its 
eyes to heaven, and see only the bright spirit of 
perfection that it delights to suffer for." 

THE PURPORT OF INTELLECTUAL PLEASURE. 

The theme was no sooner ended, than young 
Ben threw his arms about his godfather's neck, 
and hugged him enthusiastically, as he cried : 
"Oh, thank you, uncle! thank you for the fine 



THE NEXT TURNING. 309 

feelings you have given me ;" but though the poor 
little fellow tried to speak on, his heart was too 
full for utterance ; and hysteric sobs burst out 
instead of words, while Uncle Ben felt a tear- 
drop fall warm upon his hand. Then, as the 
lad hid his face upon his uncle's shoulder, the 
old man ^soothed him with fondling, while he 
said : " There, don't be shamefaced, Ben ! give it 
vent, lad, give it vent ! and it will soon pass away." 

" I feel as if I had got a ball in my throat," cried 
the little man, in a minute or two, starting up 
and pressing his fingers on his windpipe. 
Presently he began walking rapidly up and down 
in front of the rock on which they had been 
seated, and, after a few turns, stopped suddenly in 
front of his godfather, as he exclaimed, with a 
thump of the air to enforce the speech: "I shall 
be an artist, uncle — I shall." 

" Lad ! lad ! lad ! how you talk !" returned the 
other. " Have I been speaking only to create a 
phrensy in you, when all I wanted was to beget a 
love. Say you'll be a king, boy : it's easier far ; 
since no special genius is required for that. Say 
you'll be a giant, even though you are born a 
pigmy ; you might as well. Ah, Ben ! like a 
hundred others in the world, you mistake a taste 
for a faculty, a mere developed liking, for an 
inherent power — the power to conceive finely arid 
execute gracefully ; and this is a widely different 
thing from the function of merely perceiving and 
enjoying. All the world, if duly educated, may have 
the enjoyment awakened and developed in them ; 
but the power can never be given to them ; any 
more than one could give them the power of soar- 
ing like eagles, when they lack the special organi- 
zation of the eagle-spirit and the eagle-wings." 

The boy hardly relished his uncle's demolition 
of his conceit, so he merely murmured by way of 



310 YOUNG BEXJAMIN FRANKLIN. 

reply, " Now I suppose we have done for to-nigiit, 
eh? Besides, I want to get home, and think of 
all you've said." 

"AVell, my good lad, I won't keep yon long 
now," returned the godfather : " but we mustn't 
go without giving a thought respecting what we 
came for, Ben. You forget ; what you \*anted was 
to be set on the right road, little man ; but as yet 
we have only surveyed the quiet shady lane, which 
3 r ou called the path of intellectual pleasure ; so we 
have still to decide whether that will be the 
cleanest, or the most agreeable, or even the 
shortest way to worldly happiness." 

" No more we have !" ejaculated young Ben, as 
the omission flashed upon him ; and then he sud- 
denly added, " but my mind's quite made up 
though ! I mean to go that way through life, I can 
tell you, unky." 

" Gently — gently ! gently over the stones, boy, 
as the coachmen say," cried the uncle, in a tone of 
warning. 

This made his little godson turn sharply round, 
and inquire : " What d'ye mean by that, Uncle 
Ben?" 

"Why, I mean, lad," he went on, "that you'd 
•find, before you got half through your journey, 
that it was sore hard travelling. It's but a by- 
way at best, Ben ; and if you want to make it the 
high road, you'll find, sooner or later, you'll stick 
deep in the mire, like many others who have made 
the same mistake." 

" I don't understand you, uncle : after all the 
grand things you've been saying about it, too," 
interposed the little fellow, growing half peevish 
at the crossing of his purpose. 

"Why, look here! what did I tell you were 
the three main objects of human life ?" the old 
man asked. 



THE XEXT TURXIXG. 311 

"Let me see! what did yon say they were?" 
young Ben inquired of himself; "though. I'm 
sure you've told me so many things, I can't 
exactly remember them just now." 

" Business " — began the other. 

But before he had time to finish the sentence, 
the boy had added w - amusements, and duties." 

" Well, then, lad," the uncle proceeded, " as 
sensual pleasures (or rather the relief of the wants 
and uneasinesses begotten by the senses) make up 
the main business of life, so the intellectual plea- 
sures should form the basis of man's mature 
amusement : and kept within their due sphere, 
they are the lovely, grand, and pure enjoyments 
of our soul. If, however, we mil make a stern 
business of what should be merely a fine amuse- 
ment;— if we trill be at play, lad, when we should 
be at hard work — no matter how graceful and 
refining the play may naturally be : — if we will try 
to live on flowers (and remember the flowers are 
the most useless, though the most beautiful of all 
natural objects, Ben), and won't seek bread, why 
of course we can't expect worldly welfare. De- 
pend upon it, my boy, we have only to burst 
through the regular round of nature at any time, 
for a whole legion of ugly imps and evil spirits to 
rush in upon us directly the magic circle is 
broken." 

" Oh then, I suppose, you mean to say, uncle," 
interposed blaster Ben, " that was the reason why 
the poet had taken the wrong road ?" 

" Of course it was," said the old man. " He 
was one of the many poor fellows who try to live 
on flowers, and who starve rather than live at the 
business. For let a man be as busy as a bee, 
Ben — ay, and as thrifty as a bee too, — he cannot 
hive much of what ■ the poet called the world's 
honey, out of the buttercups and daisies strewn in 



312 YOUKG BENJAMIN FRANKLIN. 

our path. If the exigences of human nature 
rendered poetry as crying a necessity as food and 
raiment ; if the love of the beautiful and the good 
had been made an appetite, and had bred in us all 
the pangs of an appetite when not satisfied (instead 
of being merely one of the many bountiful after- 
enjoyments that we have been fitted to feel, on 
the assuagement of the appetites themselves) why, 
then, to have made poetry a business would have 
been high and noble worldly 'wisdom. But since 
the butcher will not take a lovely sonnet in 
exchange for a lovely leg of mutton, nor a tailor 
accept the finest possible ode for a superfine suit 
of clothes, why the larder must be empty, Ben, 
and the back be poorly clad, if we vnll continue 
toying with the beautiful, and at the same time 
warring with the wise." 

"But, uncle," put in the little fellow, " Shak- 
speare was a poet ; and yet, I think, I read up in 
your room, that at the end of his life he wasn't at 
all badly off, either." 

&i He was simply the finest and wisest poet, 
perhaps, the world ever saw, my good lad," the 
answer ran; "and just one of the few profound 
geniuses that can ever make a fortune out of an 
art. You see, Ben, the great drawback of the 
artistic passion is, that it leads so many to do 
what you were about to do just now : mistake the 
mere love of art, begotten in them by the grand 
works of others, for an inherent power existing in 
themselves. The intense admiration that is ex- 
cited by all works of high art, begets an 
enthusiastic love for the art-creators ; and this 
passion again begets, in its turn, a fervent desire 
in the breasts of those who feel it, that others should 
have the same enthusiastic love for them. So, as 
each art-worshipper longs in his soul to be trans- 
Itaed, from the humility of the devotee, into all the 



THE NEXT TURNING. 313 

glory of the idol, or, in plain English, to be regarded 
as a genius by the world — why it is not a very dif- 
ficult matter for him to cheat himself, at last, into 
the belief that he is what he wishes to be. Hence 
hundreds of mere clever folk are led to make a 
business of that which should be merely an elegant 
amusement to them ; but, alas, (as in all arts 
it is only genius, or inordinate natural power, that 
we admire and value) mere cleverness — which is 
simply ordinary educated power — becomes utterly 
valueless to all who have any sense of high art 
itself. Consequently, your mere clever folk find it 
very difficult to get a market for their wares ; and 
thus those who should have remained amateurs — 
that is to say, simple art-lovers — rather than aspired 
to be artists or art- creators (and who would have 
thriven as carpenters, builders, or smiths, or as 
house painters, sign painters, or indeed at any 
calling where more skilled or educated handicraft 
has a value in the world), have to pay a long and 
heavy penalty for their folly, in the shape of 
want, disappointment, and envy." 

" Oh, I understand you now, and see what a 
narrow escape I have had, uncle," murmured the 
youth. " And that was why the artist we went to 
was almost as poor as the poet, eh ?" 

The answer was : " Ay, Ben, he was truly an 
art-lover, and should never have been an art- 
creator. The poor fellow could reproduce fairly 
enough, lad ; but reproduction in art is, unfortu- 
nately for such as he, the counterfeit coin that 
every true judge of the sterling metal rejects with 
disdain, as a sham and a cheat," 

"Well, but science you said, uncle, was wis- 
dom," urged young Ben ; " so I suppose the gentle- 
man who passed all his time in collecting insects, 
and in looking at them — under the telescope, I 
think it was — " 



314 YOUXG BENJAMIN FRANELDT. 

" Nay, nay ! the microscope, lad," prompted 
the uncle. 

" Well, the microscope, then," continued the 
boy, "and who spent ever such a lot of money 
npon the little tiddy lenses to it, I suppose he was 
wise, wasn't he ? Besides, you know, he was a 
rich gentleman, and could afford to indulge in 
such an amusement." 

" So could the- epicure, lad : and the one only 
differed from the other in the fact that the 
pursuit was less animal and less gross." was the 
rejoinder. " With the epicure, eating was a lust ; 
with the entomolgist, the study of animalcular life 
was a hobby." : 

The boy inquired, " And what's a hobby, 
uncle ?" 

Uncle Benjamin gave the following answer. 

"A hobby, my son, is any dry stick that big babies 
like to get astride, and go prancing and curveting 
through the great highway as proudly as if they 
had a genuine bit of blood to cany them along. 
The fools in the old May-games were always 
shown riding some childish wooden hobby-horse ; 
and the fools of modern time — who see life only as 
a May-game — must have their hobby to ride too. 
Originally the hobby-horse was a hack-horse, that 
used to carry the same everlasting pack upon his 
back, and to be perpetually travelling the same 
everlasting road. Then the fool got astride wooden 
hobbies, and rode them with all the airs of a knight- 
errant, eager to win his spurs in the world ; and 
after that babies took up the amusing foolery, and 
went a-cock -horse on their granny's crutch, antick- 
ing along as though the wretched hobbling thing 
fulfilled all the functions of life. Hence, my boy, 
a hobby came at last, to stand for any kind of sense- 
less dead horse that will bear any amount of over- 
riding ; indeed, it is a sort of dilettante clothes- 



THE XEXT TURXIXG. 315 

horse — a tiling for philosophic fops to hang their 
mental frippery upon. Hence, too, hobby-riding 
is mere childish gambolling, rather than the true 
manly exercise of the intellect : the monkey-trick 
of wisdom, trying to crack the hard nuts of the 
-world ; as if the ape himself had learnt to play the 
philosopher, and delighted to put on the sage's 
spectacles, and try and look wise by staring hard 
at the puddles and the stars through the thinker's 
glasses." 

The lad was tickled with the figure, but too 
intent on solving all the difficulties of the problem 
his uncle had set before him to do more than smile 
at the image it conjured up ; so he said — 

" Still, unky, dear, I can't understand why, if 
there's no necessity for a man to follow any 
business, he mayn't continually pursue some 
intellectual amusement without being looked upon 
only as what you call a big baby or a world's fool." 

" There's only one excuse, Ben," the tutor made 
answer, " for a man labouring day after day at the 
same occupation — to the exclusion of almost every 
other object in life : and that is, because it is a busi- 
ness with, him : that is to say, because the exigences 
of human nature at once demand and enforce it. 
But the man upon whom nature has relaxed her 
grip ; who has drawn a prize in the strange social 
lottery ; who, in the great conscription for ever 
going on to recruit the standing army of life, has 
escaped entering the ranks, by being allowed to 
find a substitute to do the hard work of the battle 
for him ; for such a man to make an amusement a 
lusiness ; for such a man to toil and labour day after 
day at unnecessary work, as if he were toiling and 
labouring for dear life itself — and that also to the 
exclusion of every other object in the world — this 
is to reverse the wise ordinations of nature, and 
give play all the austerity of hard work : as well 



318 YOUNG BENJAMIN FRANKLIN. 

as to transform what was intended to be a sweet 
and graceful relief, into an ugly sore and a source 
of endless irritation." 

" But if he likes to make play hard work, 
uncle," again urged the pertinacious little fellow, 
6i why shouldn't he do so ?" 

" Because, Ben, life should never be entirely 
sacrificed to play ; or indeed to any one pursuit 
except that of work," the tutor responded. " And 
there is no earthly reason why we should persist 
in working at this one pursuit day after day, but 
that we want food day after day : ay, and shall 
want it daily when we are too old and feeble to 
continue daily work. Besides, my boy, if Provi- 
dence, by some special and inscrutable act of grace 
towards us, has exempted us from the hard labour 
of life, and struck the iron collar of want's bitter 
serfdom off our necks, He has not exempted us, at 
the same time, from the duties of life ; but rather 
ordained that from those to whom much is given 
much is expected. Consequently, he who rides a 
hobby, rides roughshod over all the soft ties of 
nature, tramples under foot — like the reckless 
hunter dashing through a corn-field in the wild 
chase that he calls sport — all that was meant to 
comfort and sustain the suffering ; and wastes, in 
the phrensy of his amusement, the golden means of 
relief to those who want. To ride a hobby, lad 
(even though it carry us like Pegasus up to the 
very grandeur of the starry universe itself), is, after 
all — if we are for ever in the clouds — merely to 
sweep the cobwebs from the skies, and to soar, like 
an old witch upon a broomstick, far away from all 
that is required of us on earth itself." 

"But, Uncle Ben," inquired his pupil, "if 
such pursuits are not hobbies— if they are really the 
business by which people live, then there is 
nothing wrong in them, I suppose?" 



THE NEXT TURNING. 317 

" So far from there being anything wrong in 
them, when not made the one over-weening and all- 
absorbing amusement of a life, lad," he answered, 
" they are studies that make every one, who has 
the faculty to comprehend the wonders revealed by 
them, feel an everlasting poem in his brain, far 
beyond the power of even Milton himself to shape 
into words ; and those with whom they are a 
business rather than a passion, depend upon it, find 
such studies — even grand as they are when oc- 
casionally contemplated in the lull of the work- 
day world — often harden into toil that makes 
the brain ache again, after long labouring at 
them ; and as the mill-horse, who was kept grind- 
ing for ever in one eternal circle throughout 
the week, found ease and delight only in un- 
winding himself, as it were, on the Sabbath, by 
turning in precisely the contrary direction ; so the 
study of the revolutions of the heavenly bodies 
lends, in its torn, an inordinate delight and grace 
to the round of intellectual pleasure on the earth. 

" And now, lad, we have but to note how these 
same intellectual pleasures are distinguished from 
the pleasures of the senses, to haye exhausted this 
part of our subject. "What did I tell you, Ben, 
were the peculiar characteristics of sensual en- 
joyments ?" and as the old man asked the question 
he rose from his seat, and taking the boy by the 
hand, commenced walking homewards along the 
shore. 

"Why, uncle, you said," cried the little fellow 
■ — "for I remember it struck me strongly at the 
time — that as a sensation was always caused by 
the operation of something outside of us — " 

" Yes, those were my words, Ben," interposed 
the godfather. " Go on." 

" I know what you meant, but it's so hard to 
say it as you did, uncle," the boy added, after a 



318 YOUNG BENJAMIN FRANKLIN. 

pause ; and then with a little stammering, 
jerked out, " Why, you said we must go hunt for 
the objects of sensual pleasure in the world about 
us ; yes, and you said we must often have to pay 
dearly for them too." 

" That's perfectly right, Ben ;" and the kindly 
old teacher shook his little godson by the hand as 
he said the words. " And on the contrary, the 
intellectual pleasures are comparatively inexpensive 
ones ; lying mostly within ourselves. The very 
perception of beauty (which is perhaps the largest 
intellectual sense of all, being connected with 
almost every source of mental enjoyment) is a 
faculty that admits of continual gratification with- 
out cost. The whole world — if we will but open 
our eyes to it — is one vast temple of beauty, filled 
with works of the choicest art ; and this the very 
beggar or pauper is as free as the prince to enjoy : 
for it is a luxury that is priceless in a double sense, 
costing nothing, and yet being beyond all cost. 
Look here, lad — " and he stopped and turned to- 
wards the moon that was flooding the bay with all 
the soft splendour of the silver sunlight of its beams. 
4 'Look here! What pomp of kings was ever 
equal to this ? What palace was ever so gorgeous 
with its million lights as this vast starry hall ? 
and yet is lighted up even for the vagrant and the 
outcast, as well as for you or me. Who can ap- 
propriate this magnificent scene, boy ? Y^ho can 
buy this up so that he alone may enjoy it ? And 
yet, lovely as all this now is, what a mighty trans- 
formation — what a new beauty will be brought 
about in a few hours ! Think how the now 
colourless earth will then leap into a million hues 
with the first flash of the daylight ; how these 
dark fields will suddenly glitter in the sun with all 
the golden-green lustre of the peacock's plumage ; 
how the stars above will fade one by one from the 



THE NEXT TURXIXG. 319 

skies, and the bright-coloured little stars of the 
earth begin to peep out from the hedgerows and 
the meadows ! How this broad ocean, which is 
more like one immense floor of silver, will then be 
red as wine with the ruby light ; and think, too, boy, 
that this is a feast spread for us all, day after day, 
and a feast which never cloys — never surfeits.'' 

The boy kissed his uncle's hand in gratitude 
for the pleasant knowledge and high percep- 
tions he had given him. He was like a young 
bird whom the old one was teaching to fly, and 
he found no little difficulty in keeping on the 
wing after him ; so he rested in silent admiration 
till the other continued. 

"But not only is there the usual beauty of 
nature, Ben, ever open to us, but there is the 
beauty of the peculiar trains of thoughts and feel- 
ings, begotten by the peculiar nooks and corners 
of the earth : the beauty of the solemn mood 
inspired by the woods — the calm contemplative 
spirit engendered by the quiet lanes — the gentle 
cheerfulness begotten by the brook-side — the 
sweet serenity of soul impressed by the sea-shore. 
Again, in the very associations with which the 
mind is for ever strewing our path through life — 
like flowers scattered as we go — there is a large 
fund of delight always stored within ourselves. 
Our home is home only from the cluster of sweet 
associations that hang about the old house — thick 
and pleasant as a cloud of jasmine at the porch ; not 
a tree in the fields where we sported in our youth, 
but is entwined all round with the tendrils of many 
a sweet-scented memory ; not an old friend's face 
that is not lighted up in our eyes with the recollec- 
tion of all the happiness, and all the many little 
kindnesses rendered to us. So too with the imagi- 
nation : we have here also in our power a mighty 
principle of delight. Even with the very young, 



320 YOUNG BENJAMIN FRANKLIN. 

their plays — their little pretendings — tlieir sham 
feasts — their mock battles — their love of fairy 
stories- -all owe their pleasure to the charm of the 
fancy within, us ; while even to the more mature, 
the frost on the window-pane which the mind loves 
to shape into so many grotesque pictures, and the 
glowing sea- coal fire that we love to sit and look at, 
and trace faces, and mountains, and what not, amid 
the redhot coals, can give the fancy many an hour's 
pleasant play : even as to the poor prisoner, barred 
and bolted in his living tomb, the imagination 
is the great liberator ; for this at any time can set 
him free in mind, and carry him, in fancy, home to 
his friends again. Indeed, lad, the world within 
— if we will but wander in it — is as richly stocked 
with beauty and treasures as the world without ; 
and with beauty and treasures that are all our 
own too. It is in our brain the fairies dwell, 
and the flowers they nestle in, bloom there too ; 
there the gorgeous land of romance and en- 
chantment is to be found ; there, and there only, 
can we find Utopia, the island of perfect hap- 
piness ; there the wood nymphs and the water 
nymphs are ever lurking in the mythic streams 
and groves, and waiting but for one wave of the 
fancy's wand, to summon all to life ; there lies the 
realm of all ideal excellence and beauty, and there 
is no perfection to be found on the earth but there." 
Again the teacher paused, while he mentally 
scanned the details of his subject. The boy hadn't 
a syllable to say. His little stock of words, he 
knew, was too scanty to trust himself to speak on 
such a matter ; but his young heart was full to 
overflowing with that fine reverent fervour, that 
iris-like emotion (made up of all the brightest and 
warmest hues of the soul — love, wonder, gratitude, 
and veneration) with which the mind always turns 
to any one that has awakened grand thoughts and 



THE NEXT TURNING. 321 

perceptions in it ; and which Uncle Benjamin had 
called, in contradistinction to the moral sense and 
the common sense, the art-sense : the admiring, 
worshipful sense of human nature. 

Presently the uncle resumed, as the}' walked 
on by the shore, " But even, lad," said he, " when 
we have to hunt for the objects of intellectual 
pleasure, outside of ourselves, and to buy them 
of others in the world about us, they are to be 
had for nothing, in comparison with the costly 
luxuries of the senses. A dainty dinner would 
have cost me more than I gave for my copy of 
Plutarch's lives — the book you're so fond of, Ben, 
you know ; yet see what a number of grand feasts 
you and I have had out of it, and still it has left 
not a twinge of gout in the brain behind it either. 
For what I gave for my Shakspeare, I couldn't 
have got a diamond bigger than a speck of hoar- 
frost, lad; and yet, if I could have had one as 
big as the knob of a beadle's staff to stick in 
my shirt frill, or as brilliant as a firefly to flash 
about upon my finger, do you think the pretty 
petrified dewdrop would have done other than 
have made a big baby of me ? But, on the other 
hand, see what a man I've become by prefer- 
ring to bedizen and bejewel my mind with the 
bright thoughts and fancies of those volumes. 
For what gem in the world is there that can 
compare with that lovely crystal book ! Was 
ever a bit of earth so exquisitely transparent 
as even human nature itself is there made to 
appear ! Was there ever such play of colour, as 
there you see twinkling in all the hundred hues 
of human character ! Was there ever such fire, as 
there, where every page is aflame with human 
passion, and every line scintillates with human 
genius ! Was there ever such dazzle, such sparkle 
in a mere stone, however precious ! Why, twist 

Y 



322 YOUNG BENJAMIN FRANKLIN. 

and turn the bright adamant bit of art as you 
will, in every different light you look at it you 
shall see fresh flashes, fresh delicate tints and 
touches, fresh glitter and richness, and fresh 
beauty, too. A good book, lad, is at all times a 
wonderful thing. It is said that savages, when they 
first discover that a person has the power of com- 
municating his thoughts to another at a distance, 
by means of a few marks made upon a blank sur- 
face, fall down and worship the writer as a divine 
being. My boy, a book is naturally but a few 
pages of paper, scratched over with a few fine 
black lines ; and yet those magic lines are the 
means of enabling us to hold communion with the 
very dead themselves — to think as they thought, 
feel as they felt, hundreds of years ago. To read 
Shakspeare, my dear Ben, is to think Shakspeare, 
to be Shakspeare for the time ; it is to have the 
same bright fancies flit through our brain, the same 
passions stirring our soul, as he had while pen- 
ning the book itself. To lift the cover of such a 
work is, as it were, to roll the stone from before 
the sepulchre, and have the immortal spirit rise 
from the tomb — quick again with the very breath 
of life and genius. But though this is the natural 
marvel of a great book, its natural and spiritual 
beauty lies, not more in the fine mental enjoyment 
it gives us, than in the fine moral comfort it affords 
the soul. There are times, lad, when we are 
worldly-tired, when the spirit is footsore, as it 
were, with the fatigues of worldly care and 
worldly struggle : and it is finely ordained that it 
should be so. But then, ay then, what balm is 
the mental rest and the mental ease of a fine book 
to us ! It comes as refreshing as dew in drought ; 
as sweet and grateful as manna in the wilderness. 
It is like the very rest of heaven itself to get far 
away from the world at such times ; and then the 



THE XEXT TURXIXG. b'23 

wizardry of a really grand and thoughtful work 
is felt to be the very power of enchantment. 
When we are sick of the world's fools, lad, and 
the world's cheats, and the world's heartlessness, 
and the world's trumpery, what intense delight 
then to slip away to our study, or to some pretty 
bubbling brook-side, and turn to the fond com- 
panionship of a good book ; so as to get a smack of 
the world's wisdom, the world's greatness, the 
world's truth and goodness too ! Could we have 
known the great spirits that have delighted and 
ennobled mankind with their works, we should 
have thought it a high privilege to have had com- 
munion with them ; a signal grace to have gained 
their counsel. Still they were human like our- 
selves, Ben, and had more or less of the weakness 
and pettiness of humanity, amid all their strength 
and greatness ; but in the noblest books, lad, we 
see only the noblest part of humanity ; its inor- 
dinate power rather than its ordinary frailty ; its 
unwonted grandeur rather than its everyday mean- 
ness ; and thus by means of the best books we get 
to know the best natures that ever lived, and to 
know them in their best and happiest moods, too," 
There was still another point to enforce before 
the lesson was completed ; so after a brief rest, 
Uncle Ben continued — " I have now only to im- 
press you, my child, with a sense of the general 
■unselfish character of true intellectual enjoyment ; 
and then my worldly sermon is finished : I want 
you to mark well the distinction between the plea- 
sures of the senses and those of the mind in this 
respect. With sensual pleasure, there is almost 
always a desire to appropriate the thing that 
pleases us ; that is to say, to take it and keep it to 
ourselves, so that we alone may enjoy it ; and 
some mean natures find a small delight even in 
exciting the envy of others, by the display of the 

Y 2 



321 YOUNG BENJAMIN FRANKLIN. 

worldly valuables they have been lucky enough to 
obtain ; so that the love of pomp and show, dress 
and finery, is often found to be closely connected 
with the poor glory of worldly riches. But with 
the objects of intellectual pleasure, there is seldom, 
any such draw-back. As I said before, a man 
cannot appropriate the beauty of the landscape : 
indeed, so far from any such greed, any such crav- 
ing to monopolize what pleases us, coming upon 
the soul in a state of intellectual enjoyment, the 
very contrary feeling is awakened, and the same 
propensity for proselytism sets in, as even in religious 
fervour itself, and we grow eager to make others 
see. think, and feel as we do. Who that was ever 
fired with the beauty of a noble or graceful thought, 
a grand discovery, or a lovely scene, has not felt a 
positive yearning of the spirit to communicate the 
delight awakened in him to some congenial bosom ! 
If it were not for this exquisitely generous cha- 
racter of our mental nature, Christianity itself 
would never, probably, have travelled beyond the 
walls of Jerusalem ; for if there were the same 
greed to monopolize a high mental enjoyment, 
as there is to keep a sensual one all to ourselves, 
what desire could ever have stirred the early Chris- 
tians to seek to turn the hearts of those far dis- 
tant, from all the horrors of paganism to the sweet 
benevolence of the i new commandment' ? Again, 
Ben, if it were not for this innate love of sharing 
our mental delights with others, there could have 
been no philosophy, no teaching in the world. 
When you come, boy, to look into those wonderful 
elaborations of mental mosaic- work which make 
up the several natural sciences, you will learn how 
they have been built up, like the huge coral reefs 
in the ocean, by an infinity of distinct and minute 
workers, all labouring away far beneath the surface, 
and each intent on adding his little mite of extra 



TEASING." 325 

work to the mass, so as to give it ultimately the fine 
proportions of a great and mighty whole. You will 
then see, Ben, how little each has added, even after 
the labour of a long life ; and how many had to 
contribute their quota of industry, before the whole 
assumed anything like the grandeur and solidity 
of a rock ! And yet, lad, if each of these profound 
and minute labourers hadn't shared with the rest 
what he had been able to accomplish — if each had 
kept to himself the little bit of vantage-ground 
he had gained instead of letting it go to swell 
the common heap, why, what progress could any 
have made, or how could any have raised themselves 
above the mire ?" 

"And now, lad," concluded the man, as they 
approached the harbour of the town, ' 4 we have 
reached the port we made for ; and after our 
long voyage of discovery, you'll- feel at least the 
delight of treading with a firmer-footing, and 
learn the pleasure of standing upon terra firma at 
last." 



CHAPTER XVIII. 

TEASING. 



The lesson of life was nearly ended. There was 
only one more chapter to be got by heart ; but it 
was a difficult one to study, and required close and 
peculiar observation of the world to learn. 

Uncle Ben had to think for a time how he 
should dramatize the story he had to tell — how 
he should put life and action into it, and give it 
all the vividness that scenery and incident in- 
variably lend to a subject. 

However, at last he saw his way ; so, early the 
next morning, the boy and his godfather were out 



326 YOUNG BENJAMIN FRANKLIN. 

in the streets of Boston, going the rounds of the 
city once more. 

" Where, in goodness, are yon going to take 
me to now, uncle?" asked little Ben, as he trotted 
along at the old man's side, all agog again with 
the excitement of curiosity. 

But old Benjamin Franklin was too cunning a 
teacher to blunt the edge of what he wanted to 
cut deeply into the memory, by satisfying the 
lad's desire at once ; so he rather strove to fan the 
flame than damp the ardour of the boy's wonder 
and consequent inquisitiveness. Accordingly, he 
asked in his turn, " Where do you think, Ben? 
You've been taken out fishing — you've gone out 
boating — you've been to the hunting-plains in the 
far west — you've been round the town to see the 
great human menagerie, and the strange rational 
animals collected in it — you've been on the rocks 
by moonlight ; and all to have a peep at the world, 
and find out how to grope your way through it ; 
and now — " 

" Yes, uncle, what now?" cried the lad, on the 
very tenter-hooks of suspense; and then added 
petulantly, as the old man stopped short, " There, 
you won't go on. How you do like to tease a fel- 
low, to be sure ! I call it very unkind of you, that 
I do." But presently he said, coaxingly, " Where 
are we going to, unky, eh? You might as well 
tell a chap ; besides, what difference can it make, 
for I shall know it all in a short time ?" 

" Well, then, why can't you wait that short 
time, Ben ?" and the old man smiled as he played 
like a cat with the little mouse in his power, now- 
letting him ran on a few paces, and now pouncing 
down upon him, only to tighten the grip and in- 
crease the poor thing's torture. 

" That's the way you kept tantalizing me all 
the way to the prairies," muttered the boy, as he 



TEASIXG-. 327 

walked doggedly on beside the other. " I declare, 
all 3' on did then was to keep knag-knaging away 
at me, for all the world as one sees mother twitch 
and jerk away at the knots in a tangled skein of 
thread; asking me now, 'where I thought I was 
going to *?' and then, ' what I expected I was to be 
shown next ?' and after that, ' why I fancied yon 
took me al^ the trips yon did T and only saying, 
when I begged of yon to tell me all about it, 
* There, there, patience my little philosopher, 
patience ! yon will know all in good time : : jnst 
as yon do now." 

The old man couldn't help laughing outright, 
as the boy mimicked his voice and manner while 
repeating the reply ; for he himself could tell 
how pat the little fellow had taken him off. Then 
he said, " Well, Ben, I had an object for with- 
holding the reason at that time ; and so I have 
now. It is merely a trick I have, lad ; just a trick, 
that's all. But come, Master Ben, where do you 
think we are really going to this time ?" he began, 
again pricking the little fellow's curiosity with a 
small packet of mental pins and needles. " It's 
such a queer place to take a boy like you to, you 
can't tell." 

The lad was on thorns again. He had turned 
away half in dudgeon at the idea of his uncle 
laughing, as he thought, at his eagerness ; but the 
smallest glimmer of coming infoimation was suf- 
ficient to bring him back close to the old man's side. 
61 A queer place, is it, uncle, eh? Whereabouts is 
it? What do you call it? AY hat shall we see 
there ?" he inquired, all in one breath. 

But, poor fellow, the only answer he got was, 
" All in good time, my lad, all in good time ! wo 
sha'n't be very long before we get to it." 

The little chap could readily have cried with 
the irritation of the continued teasing; but he bit 



328 YOUNG BENJAMIN FRANKLIN. 

his lip, so that his godfather shouldn't have the 
satisfaction of seeing how vexed he was. He 
knew there was some sight in store for him, and 
he was almost frantic with the rage of the appetite 
that the old man had roused in him. 

Uncle Benjamin, however, knew well how far 
to go. He knew that overstrained curiosity, like 
the overtension of any other faculty, will often 
end in the snapping of the very chord that had 
once so tight a hold of the mind ; and that disgust 
or indifference are apt to supervene, if the desire 
be too long foiled of its object. So he began to 
relax a bit, and allow the poor struggling fish he 
had hooked, a little play of line, just to prevent his 
breaking the mere hair which held him. " Come y 
Ben," he said in a tone that sounded as if he 
was relenting, " I won't tease my little man any 
more," and he drew the lad towards him as he 
spoke ; "so where do you think now I am realty 
going to take you to ?" 

Poor Ben wanted to turn away again, for he 
expected the same question would bring only the 
same evasive reply ; but the old man held him 
fast. " There, you're beginning your teasing 
again, uncle, I declare," cried the boy, half angry, 
even though he couldn't help laughing in the 
midst of it. 

" No, I'm not, lad, indeed I'm not," answered 
the playful old boy, who couldn't keep from 
laughing too. " I'm going to tell you, for I know 
you'll never guess. It's such a queer place you 
can't think; the queerest place in the' world to 
take a boy like you to, as I said before." 

" Yes, I know you said it before, and what's 
the use of repeating it over and over again ?" he 
exclaimed with a quick toss of the head that ex- 
pressed whole volumes more than my Lord Bur- 
leigh's celebrated shake. 



TEASING. 329 

" How can you say so, Ben, when I'm going to 
tell you, I say again?" the uncle pretended to 
expostulate. 

" Then why don't you do it, and have done 
with it ?" shouted the boy, savagely. 

The godfather saw that he had gone the full 
length of his tether. It was plain the lad could 
bear no more trifling with ; so uncle Ben said, as he- 
stood still in the street, and looked the little fellow 
in the face, " I'm going to take you, Ben — " 

The boy couldn't wait for the information that 
he now knew was on the tip of his uncle's tongue, 
so as the old man paused for a minute to give the 
words extra force at the end of the sentence, he 
cried " Where ?" 

" Why, to jail, lad — to jail !" was the reply. 

" Ah, now you are only making a fool of me !" 
and the indignant boy turned upon his heel, as 
his uncle fell to laughing outright at the little 
fellow's exhibition of incredulity. 

" Hoi ! what are you up to, boy ! where are you 
going to ?" Uncle Ben cried through his chuckles, 
as he saw the youth marching back home again : 
but finding the youth paid no heed to his cries, 
the old man set off running after him, his sides 
still shaking with the fun the while, so that he 
went along wobbling like a jelly when it's moved. 

" Come back, you rogue," he gasped out, as at 
last he got close up with the boy, and seized him 
by the collar; " I tell you I'm going to take you 
to jail," and then as he stared in the face of the 
astonished lad, he burst out giggling again so 
heartily that Ben himself — for honest good hu- 
mour is always infectious — was obliged to take 
the frown out of his little brow and pucker his 
cheeks into dimples instead. And there the pair 
stood for a while laughing at each other in the 
middle of the street. 



330 YOUNG BENJAMIN FEANKLIN. 

" You're only having a game with me, ain't 
you now, uncle ?" inquired the pacified youngster, 
when the whim was over, and they turned round 
to resume their way. 

" I tell you, Master Ben, you are a little unbe- 
lieving Jew, you are. It's as true as gospel, lad — 
and you know I wouldn't say that in jest," the old 
man replied. " I'm going to take you to the jail." 

" The jail !" echoed young Ben, in his wonder. 

" Ay, boy, the jail!" repeated the other. " I'm 
going to show you the end of the road to ruin in 
this life. I'm going to let you see what wisdom 
there is in the poor-house — as well as the prison." 

" No ! are you really, uncle ? Well, do you know, 
I've long wanted to see what such places are 
like," added the boy, who was now himself 
again, and fully satisfied that his godfather's fit 
of fun-poking was over. " But still, as I don't 
mean to go to ruin, Uncle Ben, I can't see what 
good there can be in your pointing out to me the 
road to it," 

" I have no such object in view, my boy," went 
on the old man; "My scheme is not the paltry 
nursery trick of frightening you into rectitude, 
by showing you the death's head and bare bones 
of worldly vice and folly. I don't want to make 
squalor and infamy mere moral bugaboos ; but, 
rather, I do want to let you learn what kindly 
and touching things they can whisper in your 
heart's ear, if your heart will but turn to them. I 
want to use the ugliness of life as a means of 
giving you a sense of the highest beauty in the 
world, lad." 

" Oh, I thought you were going to let me see 
these places, so that I might leam where I should 
get to at last, if I was foolish enough to take the 
wrong road," said the youth, still harping on the 
old figure. 



TEASIXG. 331 

Uncle Benjamin shook his head and smiled as 
he said, " The artifice has been tried a thousand 
times, and failed jnst a thousand times too. 
People see thus much of life made out in the 
trashy melo-dramas of the playhouse, night after 
night, Ben, and yet persons of my way of 
thinking — even though I do read and delight in 
Shakspeare " — he put in parenthetically — " believe 
that the morality of the playhouse is poor, power- 
less stuff after all. Even in the silliest works 
of fiction, virtue is always rewarded and vice 
punished, and yet the silly people who read them 
v:ill be vicious, and icon't be virtuous, despite of 
the teaching. There is always a moral, too, — some 
wretched drivelling copy-book platitude, — tacked 
on the tail of every fable ; and yet, lad, what boy 
was ever cured of saying ' don't care,' because 
that wicked Harry, in the spelling book, was 
eaten up alive by a roaring lion for it — even 
though the punishment is so tremendous, and the 
fault so trivial?" 

Young Ben smiled as he remembered the 
appalling illustration of wretched " don't care " 
Harry, in the act of being devoured by the 
hungry beast, in the primer he had used at Mr. 
Brownwell's school. 

" The best moral lesson we can ever hope to 
give a person, Ben, is a truthful insight into 
human nature" — the uncle went on. " The idle 
scholastic method of connecting a prize or a 
thrashing with good-conduct, or the reverse, ex- 
hibits the crudest knowledge of the motives of 
mankind ; for it makes the object to be gained, or 
avoided, something extrinsic to the thing itself; 
and thus, while it leaves the propensity to err the 
same as ever, it leads the mind to indulge in all 
kinds of cheatery to win the one or escape from 
the other. There is but one certain and sound 



662 YOUNG BENJAMIN FRANKLIN. 

way to bring men to good, and turn them from 
the evil that is in their hearts; and that is by- 
attacking the erratic propensity itself, and bring- 
ing them to love the goodness for mere goodness' 
sake, and loathe the evil simply because it is 
morally loathesome. Once awaken this sense of 
moral beauty and moral ugliness in a human 
being, and you are sure of your man ; for it is 
this same beauty, either of the senses, the mind, 
the heart, or the soul, that all are perpetually 
pursuing. But appeal to the mere brute greed of 
man's nature ; teach him that he can get some- 
thing by being good, or avoid something that he 
dislikes by respectable conduct, and depend upon 
it he is certain to remain innately bad at heart ; 
and instead of our reaping a goodly harvest of 
golden grain in the end, we shall find that we 
have raised merely a vile crop of weeds and tares, 
in the shape of worldly cunning, lying, and 
hypocrisy." 



CHAPTEE XIX. 

THE LOWEST " RUNGS " ON THE LADDER. 

Old Benjamin Franklin had barely finished ex- 
plaining to his little nephew what was his object 
in taking him to see the sights he was about to 
show him, when they came in view of a large, 
ugly, overgrown building, that stood just at the 
outskirts of the town. 

" That is 'the house,' Ben," said the uncle, as 
they halted in front of it; " 'the house/ as the 
poor always call it, for they seem to think there is 
no other house worthy of note in the whole town, 
and always speak of it as the particular thing of 



THE LOWEST " RUNGS " ON THE LADDER. 333 

its kind ; as we do, indeed, of the sun, the air, the 
sea, or even as we say, the House of Commons, 
and the Bank." 

The building itself was of the bare, long, dead- 
wall, many-windowed style of architecture pecu- 
liar to factories, barracks, prisons, hospitals, and 
madhouses. A huge light-house-like chimney, 
with a long black plume of smoke rising above 
the roof, would have made one fancy it was an 
immense workshop ; a few soldiers in their shirt- 
sleeves at the windows, and sundry pairs of regi- 
mental trousers hanging to dry outside of the case- 
ment, with a sentry pacing in front of the gate, 
would have rendered it the perfect type of a military 
depot; or had the long lines of windows been 
trellised with thick iron bars, it might on the 
other hand have stood for the county jail or the 
lunatic asylum ; while it only wanted the long 
board announcing that it was " supported by 
voluntary contributions," and the little money- 
box let into tbe wall beside the door, to have con- 
verted it into an institution for the cure of certain 
diseases. 

Uncle Benjamin knocked at the gate, and 
immediately the little square wicket was opened, 
and the round, fat, ruddy face of the old soldier, 
who acted as porter to the establishment, appeared 
behind the gridiron-like bars. The man recog- 
nized the features of the elder Benjamin, and 
knowing him to be a friend of the " Master," the 
gate was duly opened, and the couple entered the 
yard. 

Close beside the gate stood the square box of 
the porter's lodge, which gave one the idea of its 
being an enormous dog-kennel, placed there to 
guard the entrance: while the yard itself con- 
sisted of an acre or two of mere bare gravel ; and 
this was kept so tidy, and had been swept so even , 



334 YOUNG BENJAMIN FRANKLIN. 

and rolled so flat, that it seemed like one large 
sheet of sand-paper spread over the ground, whilst 
in the middle of it strutted some dozen or two 
of pigeons, as pompous and gorgeous as beadles. 

To cross the threshold of the poor-house ap- 
peared to the boy like stepping into another 
country. He had never seen such a collection of 
old people before, nor indeed people so very old ; 
for the inmates were far older and weaker than 
any met with in the street, while the younger 
folk were, many of them, either blind, crippled, 
or idiotic. 

Little Ben had heard the deacons of his father's 
chapel complain, as they sat chatting with Josiah 
in the little back parlour in the evening, of the 
heaviness of the parish rates, and speak of the 
paupers as "a pack of lazy vagabonds;" and his 
prejudice had been rather increased than lessened 
by his uncle's exordium upon work and thrift, as 
the only means of avoiding penury. 

But once within those walls, the little fellow 
was staggered with the amount of worldly help- 
lessness focussed, as it were, in that " dark 
chamber " of the town. There was every variety 
of senility, imbecility, and infirmity gathered to- 
gether there, as if it had been a natural museum 
for the display of all the peculiar "specimens" 
of bodily and mental inefficiency. Some of the 
old went toddling about in their suits of granite- 
gray, along the white border of flag-stones in front 
of the building itself, with all the ricketiness 
of babyhood; others scambled and shuffled on, as 
if palsied with weakness ; and other poor crooked- 
back things staggered onwards, pace by pace at 
a time, with a stick in either hand to prop them 
as they went. Some again sat shaking on the yard 
benches in places where the sun fell, basking in the 
warm beams, in the vain hope of being warmed by 



THE LOWEST (i RUNGS " OX THE LADDER. 335 

them ; and not a few had their white nightcaps 
shining under their Greenwich-pensioner-like hats, 
as if they were ever ready for sleep, and waiting 
for the last, the long profound slumber of all. 

Then the big owl-like spectacles of some of the 
aged creatures — the mumbling, toothless tones 
and gasping wheezy voices of others — the con- 
tinued asthmatic coughings of almost all — and the 
occasional shouting of some hale official into the 
ear of some one of the crew, as the gaffer stood 
with his face turned from the speaker, and his 
veiny, shrivelled hand at the side of his head and 
close against the mouth of the other, straining to 
catch something like the meaning of what was 
said — all impressed the mind with such a sense 
of bodily and mental decay, that ruin seemed 
stamped upon everything ; not merely worldly 
ruin, but the ruin of every human faculty too. 

The boy couldn't help wondering whether Uncle 
Ben, or himself, could ever come to be like one 
of those. 

Many of the young things in gray, on the other 
hand, were almost as powerless in body and mind 
as the old. Some had that peculiar dropping of 
the lower jaw — that dangling of the hands from 
the joints of the wrists, and that strange dragging, 
scuffling gait, as they went about, that are the 
outward visible signs of an utter want of an 
inward and spiritual everything. Some again 
were blind, and sat in the sun with their faces 
upturned, smiling vacantly as they rolled their 
white opaque pupils restlessly and uselessly about, 
now turning them up half into their heads, and 
now wiping away the tears that kept streaming 
from them ; not a few went hopping along on 
crutches, or crouching down nearly to the ground, 
while others were bent almost double with some 
horrid spinal deformity. 



336 Youisra benjamin fkanklin. 

Then there was so curious and marked a shame- 
lessness, or apparent callousness in the faces of 
all, that this characteristic perhaps struck the 
mind with greater force than anything else, after 
the first impression of the utter helplessness of so 
large a number had faded a little from the mind. 
Young Ben naturally expected to find that all 
who had a thought or feeling left, would exhibit 
some sense of worldly disgrace or sorrow at being 
inmates of such a place ; and he even fancied that 
wretchedness and misery would be seen in every 
countenance ; so that the decent-minded lad was 
half shocked when he saw the " able-bodied young 
women " stare and grin in his face, as they went 
by in their duster-checked aprons and large white 
caps. And though he looked all around, he could 
not discover one dejected head, one abashed counte- 
nance, or one tearful eye throughout the whole of 
that wretched pauper town. 

The boy twitched his uncle by the skirt, and 
said in a whisper to him, "Don't they feel, then, 
uncle — don't they really care about being here ? 
They don't seem to think it any disgrace that I 
oan see." 

" No, lad ; they soon get settled down to their 
lot ; and such as do chafe under it, suffer more 
from a sense of persecution and wrong in the 
world, than from any idea of worldly degrada- 
tion," answered the old man in an under tone as 
he drew the lad to one side. u If you were to go 
into a debtor's prison, Ben, you'd be struck to 
find that not one was confined there, according to 
his own story, for any just debt of his. So it is 
here, lad ; for the mind never likes to see, and 
therefore never sees, its own errors. All these 
poor people are here, they believe, from misfor- 
tune ; and many assuredly are so too, boy :^ not a 
few are impressed with a full sense of their right 



THE LOWEST " RUNGS " ON THE LADDER. 337 

to the place, and are ready to assert it lustily, I 
can tell you; but none fancy they are here, 
depend upon it, from any imprudence or vice of 
their own ; though if you were to listen to my 
friend, the master, he'd want to make out to you 
that that was the sole cause of every one of them 
being inside the gates." 

" I wish I hadn't come, uncle," exclaimed the 
honest lad ; "I shall never think well of the poor 
again." 

" Don't be hasty, boy!" was the mild reproof. 
"We are every one of us apt to sentimentalize 
about such matters. We always come to such a 
place as this with some preconceived view — some 
extreme notion, either that the poor are pitiable, 
persecuted angels, or else lazy, drunken and un- 
grateful scoundrels ; and if the real poor don't 
happen to square with our imaginary poor, why, 
we'll have nothing to do with them. Do as I do, 
boy — strike the mean ! — strike the mean! Don't 
put thorough faith in the injured air and misfortune 
of the paupers themselves, nor yet in the austere 
and uncharitable views of the master ; but strike 
the mean! Every employer believes that he 
overpays his workmen ; and every workman 
believes that he is underpaid by his employer — 
strike the mean ! Every mistress is under the 
impression that her servant doesn't do half what 
she ought for her; every servant is satisfied that 
her mistress 'don't do nothink at all for her. 5 
Strike the mean, I tell you, lad ! always strike 
the mean ! And there is but one way, Ben, of 
teaching either party its errors. Let them change 
places for a while ; let one of the paupers here 
become the master, and the master be made a 
pauper, and rely on it, the master himself would 
take up the very same ill-used and right-demand- 
ing air of the pauper ; and the pauper, on the 



338 YOUNG BENJAMIN FRANKLIN". 

other hand, adopt the same harsh and uncharitable 
views as the master. It is but human nature, 
after all, Ben. Under the same circumstances 
the generality of people become the same as 
others." 

At this moment the master of the pcor-house 
himself made his appearance, and walked with 
them over to the other side Gf the yard. 

" My little nephew," said the uncle, turning 
to young Benjamin, after the greeting was over, 
" is rather astonished to find that the poor crea- 
tures here exhibit no signs of shame, and has just 
been asking whether they really feel for their 
situation." 

"Feel, indeed!" cried the master, with a toss 
of the head that made the heavy bunch of keys he 
carried jangle again in his hand. " They hav'n't 
got the feelings of ordinary flesh and blood, sir. 
I've been master of this here house, and my good 
woman 'the matron of it three- and-twenty year 
come next Michaelmas, and think I ought to have 
learnt a little about the inmates of it in that time — ■ 
eh, friend Franklin ?" 

*' Perhaps you have been here a little too long," 
mildly suggested old Benjamin. " A surgeon, after 
long practice at a hospital, hardly believes that 
there is any feeling in people under the knife — 
and perhaps it's better it should be so." 

" Bless you now ! just look here, Master Frank- 
lin. You see that young gal there, — the one 
with the pail, slouching along as if she hadn't a 
bit of life in her — don't let her see you a-p'inting 
to her, my boy," interjected the master, turning 
in the opposite direction, as young Ben was about 
to raise his finger towards the quarter indicated. 
" Well, she's one of a long generation of paupers. 
We've got her mother here now ; and only buried 
her grandmother the t'other day. Now, if that there 



THE LOWEST " KUXGS " OX THE LADDER. 339 

family lias cost the parish, a penny, they must have 
put it to several thousand pounds — yes, several — 
thousands — of pounds expense !" he repeated, em- 
phasizing each word; ' k and do you think there 's 
the least bit of gratitude in 'em for it ? — no ; not so 
much as a ' thank you, sir :' why, they've even 
impudence enough to look you in the face, and 
tell you it's their rights ! — their rights, sir ! And 
she's not one alone, friend Franklin ; but one of a 
very large class, I give you my word, — a very 
large class, sir." 

"Uncle Benjamin merely nodded, and the other 
went on. 

" I have to look about me pretty sharp, I can 
tell you, friend Franklin ; and though I've been 
here three-and-twenty year, come next Michael- 
mas, as I said before, I assure you these people 
here are as well up in the law of settlement and 
passes, and all that there sort of thing, as I am 
myself. Ay, and they know the dietary scale by 
heart, from, beginning to end, I give you my word. 
But what annoys me more than all, Master Frank- 
lin, is the way in which these people can impose 
upon our Chaplain — who is a nice, kind, easy 
sort of gentleman enough. I don't know whether 
you are acquainted with him — but he's no man of 
the world, you see, sir — no man of the world ;" 
and the master put his forefinger right down one 
side of his nose, and bent the organ slightly. " out 
of straight," as he looked shrewdly out of the 
corners of his eyes in the direction of the elder 
Benjamin. "Oh, he is shamefully tricked by 
them; and often places me in a very awkward 
position indeed ; for sometimes, when I've been 
obliged to report some gal as riotous and dis- 
orderly, for — for pelting me with the suet dump- 
ings, say, as was the case only last board-day 
with Mary Collins, because she said the flour 

z 2 



340 YOUNG BENJAMIN FRANKLIN. 

was musty and the suet stinking ! Well, the 
overseers, as I was a-going to say, will turn to 
the chaplain's monthly statement to see what he 
says about the gal's general behaviour ; and there 
they find, agin Mary Collins' name, either that 
she is ' a-going on very satisfactorily indeed,' or 
else that he'd ' every reason to be gratified with 
her conduct,' I forget which." 

Uncle Benjamin loved a joke well enough to be 
able to laugh at the discomfiture even of his 
friend the master ; and merely chuckled out, that 
such conflicting statements must be awkward, 
certainly. 

"Yes; the deceit of these people really sur- 
passes belief, sir, I give you my word ; and our 
poor chaplain isn't a match for them by a long 
way. Now, to give you another instance, there's 
Elizabeth Davis — I saw her in the yard just 
now," he broke off, looking all about to find the 
woman — "well, I suppose she's gone into the 
laundry again, but never mind — as I was a-saying, 
about Elizabeth Davis — you'd fancy butter wouldn't 
melt in her mouth, sir ; and she has a tongue 
that would wheedle a charitable donation out of 
a pawnbroker. Well, sir, she's engaged in our 
laundry ; for of course I needn't tell you we do all 
our washing here ourselves ; and we allow the 
women engaged at the washtubs, and a few other 
perquisite women, who do the hard work of the 
house, just half a pir.t of porter, after they've done 
their work. Now our porter, Mister Eranklin, is 
sitch porter as it's impossible to buy in the town, 
at comes to us, you see, direct from the brewery, 
and is the real genuine article, I can assure you. 
It wasn't certainly the correct thing when the 
Phoenix brewery had the contract : but since we 
accepted the tender of the ' Star,' there hasn't 
been a fault to find with it, I give you my honour. 



THE LOWEST "RUtfGS" OX THE LADDER. 341 

Oh, it really is a superb glass of beer ; indeed, our 
beadle declares it's the best glass of beer he ever 
tasted in all his life. Well, sir, let me see, where 
was I ? — oh, I was saying that that there Elizabeth 
Davis — Ha ! there the woman is now,*' he broke 
oil ; ' ' just come out of the 4 old women's ward,' with 
her sleeves tucked up, and her hands all white 
and shrivelled with the washing — D'ye see ; there, 
she's dropping us a curtsy, for she takes you for 
one of our select vestry, I dare say. Well, sir, 
that there woman had her half- pint sarved out 
after her work the other day ; and shortly after 
that, in she bounces into my room, with the 
pannikin in her hand, and says, as she slaps it 
down on the table afore me, ' This here beer's 
not fit to give a pig !' ' What's the matter with 
it, Davis ?' says I, quite gently. ' Matter with 
it!' says she; 'why it's war jus.' Yes, that's 
what the woman called it; she did indeed, sir. 
4 Verjuice, Davis!' says I, quite gently, but still 
impressively ; ' you ought to be ashamed of your- 
self to apply such wicked terms to the good 
things that the Almighty and the parish over- 
seers provide for you, to comfort you in your 
poverty and time of tribulation.' ' The parish 
overseers be shot,' she exclaims. Did you ever 
hear such terrible language, friend Franklin ? 
' It's them as pays rates,' she goes on, ' like my 
poor husband did for more than ten long year, as 
finds us in what we're allowed ; and my dues is 
what I'll have, too, I can tell you, old un ' — yes, 
sir, she called me ' old un ;' she did, upon my 
honour ! ' Well,' says I, still quite gently — but 
firmly, you know, ' there's no other beer for you 
than this here, Davis ; and as for its being in the 
least pricked, it's all idle fancy.' ' Pricked !' roars 
she ; 4 what's that ?' ' Why, sour,' says I, never 
losing myself a bit. 'I tell you it is sour,' 



342 YOUXG BENJAMIX FRANKLIN. 

slie bellows out. 'I tell yon it is not sour,' I 
answers, still mildly, but more firmly than ever. 
' Taste it yourself, then,' says she ; whereupon, 
like a fool, I did raise the pannikin to my lips ; 
but I no sooner got it there, than the artful, spiteful 
hussey gives the tin a knock at the bottom, and 
sends the whole of the beer right into my face, 
all down my neck and over my clean shirt-front, 
till, I give you my word, my frill was like a piece 
of soaked brown paper." 

Uncle Benjamin tried to look serious ; but it 
was more than either he or Ben could do : so they 
had resort to their handkerchiefs, and smothered 
their laughter in the linen. 

" Well, friend, of course that there was a breach 
of discipline," continued the poor-house master, 
"that I couldn't possibly pass by unnoticed; so 
I not only stopped the woman's snuff and her 
weekly ounce of sugar, but I reported her to the 
overseers at the very next meeting ; and when 
they had heerd my case, and agreed that it was 
something more than disorderly and refractory, 
and amounted almost to open rebellion — yes, re- 
bellion, Friend Franklin, they referred as usual 
to the chaplain's book, to see what kind of a 
general karackter the woman had, before making 
their award ; and there, agin her name, were 
these here very words — let me see, how did it 
run ? for I've no wish to sp'ile it, I can tell you : — - 

" ' JElizabeth Davis — conduct exemplary — obeys cheer- 
fully — works hard and willingly — is regular at her devo- 
tions, — and altogether her moral and religious deport- 
ment of a very pleasing and consoling character,'' ,: 

Ben hardly knew which he disliked the more — 
Elizabeth Davis, or the master of the poor-house 
himself ; and he was not at all sorry when Uncle 
Ben proposed, in order to stop the long list of 
grievances that the wretched, ill-used master was 



THE LOWEST "RTJNGS" OX THE LADDER. 343 

about to treat thenito, that " the youngster there " 
should be allowed to inspect the "boy's side" of 
the establishment. 

As the master led the way, the elder Benjamin 
nudged the younger one with his elbow, and whis- 
pered under his little three-cornered hat, ' ' Strike 
the mean , Ben ! strike the mean ! " 

Once in the passages, the smell of pauperism 
was marked and strong. The whole place reeked 
with the true poor-house perfume, which was a 
compound of the peculiar odour of bread, gruel, 
treacle, corduroys, pea-soup, soft soap, boiled rice, 
and washing; and as Ben and his uncle followed 
the master, who went along with his keys jangling 
like a waggon-team, the yellow sand kept scrunch- 
ing as though it were so much sugar under the 
feet ; for not a board nor a flagstone in the place 
but was as scrupulously clean and carefully sanded 
as the entrance to a livery stable. 

They had not proceeded far, however, ere one 
of the pauper officials — an " in-doors' man," who 
had been promoted to the post of wardsman — came 
hurrying after the master, saying, " Oh, if you 
please, sir, there's three ounces of port wine 
wanted for the infirmary ; and quick, please, sir." 
So the two Benjamins had to be thrust into the 
bare and empty board-room ; there to wait while 
the master retired to the store-room, to see the 
quantum of wine duly measured out. 

The boy was no sooner in the large, desolate- 
looking apartment, than he began staring up at 
the walls, and wheeling round and round, like a 
countryman in a strange city — now reading the 
large painted table of " rules and regulations con- 
cerning disorderly and refractory paupers," and 
now studying the printed and varnished broad- 
sheet, headed " Dietary table," and which, with a 
surveyor's plan of the parish and its boundaries, 



344 YOUNG BENJAMIN FRANKLIN. 

and an enormous map of the city, that was mounted 
after the fashion of a window-blind , were severally 
made to do duty for pictures against the walls. 
Then the boy ran off to look at the only painting 
in the room, which hung above the mantelpiece, 
and which proved to be the portrait of " Mar- 
garet Fleming," who, as the inscription said, 
"died m this house, aged 103." Next he was 
counting the number of mahogany chairs that were 
drawn up in single file along the skirting-board all 
round the room, and so finding out how many 
" select vestrymen " were in the habit of sitting, 
on full board days, at that big horse-shoe table, 
that was as green and bare as a billiard-board, 
and which, with the high-backed chair, standing 
alone, throne-like, at the upper end, seemed al- 
most to fill the entire apartment. 

But in another minute the master was with 
them again, and telling them, as he went jangling 
along the corridors, that he was afraid " the port 
wine would be utterly wasted, for the poor old 
thing it was wanted for was turned seventy, and 
had been sinking for many days ; but their surgeon 
was such a fool, and really seemed to fancy they 
got their port from the pump." 

Then as they passed through the women's ward, 
a hundred old crones in blue-check gowns and 
big, white caps, suddenly rose from the forms, 
and kept curtsying one after another, as the 
visitors walked along between the deal tables, and 
bobbing away like so many floats experiencing a 
rapid succession of nibbles. Here too, Ben saw 
the sleek and fat poor-house cat curled up asleep 
in one of the old women's aprons ; while the arms 
of another were laden with "little Roger Con- 
nell," one of the children out of the poor-house 
nursery that the hirsute old female pauper had 
begged the loan of to mind for a while — and 



THE LOWEST " RUNGS " OX THE LADDER. 345 

whom, she was fondling as if it had been* her own, 
even though the poor pretty-featured little thing- 
was a mass of sore with the scurvy. 

" Yes, Master Franklin, you can get these here 
old things to do anything if you'll only let 'em have 
one of the little children out of our nursery to pet 
for an hour or two," said the master, as he passed 
out of the ward, and came to the door at the 
bottom of the yard that led to the ' boy's side^'of 
the building. "Bless you, ugly or pretty is all 
the same to them, so long as they're young ; that's 
the only beauty in their eyes," he went on, while 
he found the proper key for the lock, and then 
paused for a minute before turning it. "I do 
verily believe now, that, selfish as they are to one 
another, they'd even give a goodish part of their 
week's hounce of sugar away to the young ones, and 
that the allowance might just as well be cut off 
altogether, leastwise for the matter of good it is 
to the old people theirselves." 

The yard door was then opened, and instantly 
there burst upon the ear a shrill babel of voices. 
Here the air above was spotted over with a perfect 
covey of half-developed tadpole-like kites ; while 
the branches of the trees outside the walls of the 
large quadrangle were festooned with the tattered 
remains of the tails and wings of others, that had 
got entangled among the boughs. 

" There they are, my lad," cried the master, as 
he threw open the door, and hardly moved beyond 
it ; " this is their hour's play : there they are, sir, 
of all ages, and sizes, ay, and shapes, too ; though 
we keep the most helpless of the young, sitch as 
the blind and the hidiotic, on the other side of the 
house, as you saw. Some, you perceive, can hardly 
walk steadily, and others are big enough to be 
out and knocking about in the world for their- 
selves, instead of heating the bread of hidleness, 



346 YOUNG BENJAMIN FRANKLIN. ^ 

•which is the very ' best seconds ' as they get 
here. There they are, my lad, and a greater pack 
of yonng wagabones there isn't to be found any- 
where else in the world, I can safely say." 

"Where are their fathers and mothers?" asked 
little Ben, timidly, for he was almost afraid to put 
a question to the man. 

" Fathers and mothers ! Lor' bless your hinno- 
cence, child ! why, the greater part — ay, two out 
of every three on 'em, never knew sitch luxuries," 
answered the master, with a chuckle. ' ' They're 
orphans — horphans in the fullest sense of the 
word" (for extra emphasis always involved an 
extra aspiration with the master); "and even 
the parents of them as has got either a father or 
a mother ain't nothing to brag about, I can tell 
you, for they're either in the poor-house their- 
selves, or else they're ablebodied, and getting their 
shilling a week and their gallon loaf out-door relief 
the most on 'em." 

Uncle Benjamin couldn't help shrugging his 
shoulders and crying, "God help 'em!" as the 
utter helplessness of the young, born under such 
circumstances, fell upon his mind, with even more 
terrible force than the helplessness of the old. 

" Ay, you may well say ' God 'elp 'em !' Master 
Franklin ; for a greater set of young himps never 
wanted their hearts softened more than they do : 
and, d'ye know, I verily believe, sir, that comfort- 
able places like this here, hactually breed the very 
misery they're meant to give relief to — outdoor, or 
indoor, as the case may be. Why, nearly half of 
these lads is fondlings, as they call theirselves ; for 
they're a great deal quicker at that there kind of 
knowledge — about fondlings, and foster-mothers, 
and sitch like — than they are at their hymn-books, 
I can tell you. A great many on 'em has been 
picked up by the city watchmen on doorsteps, or 



THE LOWEST " KUXGS " OX THE LADDEE. 347 

under gateways, and a goodisli number "been tied 
in fish-baskets to the knockers of houses: and 
them as has been brought here in that there way, 
why, they have been bom in the house itself, and 
are what the world falsely calls love children ; 
though a nice lot of love there must be about sitch 
mothers, I say, as can turn their backs upon their 
own flesh and blood as soon as the little things 
comes into the world, and never care to set eyes 
on 'em afterwards ; but, on the contrayry, throws 
the whole burden upon the parish and the re- 
spectable ratepayers ; ay, and what's more, are as 
himperent to our beadle over it as if they'd a per- 
fect right to make us a present of a whole colony." 

" "Well, they don't seem to be very miserable, I 
must say," exclaimed young Ben. still harping on 
the most striking feature of all in such scenes. 

"Miserable!" echoed the poor-house master; 
4 'why, you seem to be one of those persons, my 
boy, who come here with the notion that there 
will be nothing but tears and broken hearts to be 
seen from one end of the building to the other. 
"Miserable!" he repeated, and then burst out- 
laughing, as if there was something extremely 
comic in the idea. " Hem ! miserable, indeed ! 
Ko, no, my lad, all the misery in the world you'll 
find outside our gates. People don't come here to 
be miserable, I can tell you ; but to be a great deal 
too well fed and taken care of, in my opinion. 
Just read our dietary table now, and you'll soon 
discover that there isn't much misery where 
people can have their three ounces of cooked meat 
without bone, and a pound of potatoes for dinner 
three times a week, besides a basin of excellent pea- 
soup — oh, yes, you have tasted it, friend Franklin — 
and potatoes and suet dumpling on the other days. 
Misery, indeed! Yes, but it's good full-bellied, 
wami-backed, and well-housed misery though ; 



348 YOUNG BENJAMIN FRANKLIN. 

and there isn't a merrier set of young devil-niay- 
cares than thernsame fatherless young himpshere, 
I can tell you." 

" Come, come, now, friend," cried Uncle Ben, 
who could plainly see that his godson was being 
led astray by the harsh views of the hardened 
master; " steady, my boy, stead-ee, as they call to 
the helmsman. Do you mean to tell me " — and the 
old man kept shaking his forefinger as he said the 
words slowly and solemnly-" that when some parent 
or friend comes to visit some of the more lucky of 
these poor human waifs and strays, and there's a 
cry of ' Johnson wanted,' or ' Eobertson wanted ' 
(as I've heard go round the yard over and over 
again), do you mean to tell me that those boys who 
know they haven't a friend in the world to come and 
see them, poor chicks — boys who have never so 
much as set eyes perhaps on a parent's face, or 
known what a mother's smile is like — do you mean 
to say, man alive " — and Uncle Ben shook his finger 
violently close under the master's nose — " that such 
lads (quickened with the same heart and blood as 
you yourself) when they see the lucky Johnson, or 
Eobertson, or son of somebody or other, go skip- 
ping off to the reception- ward, and come back 
playing with his halfpenny, or laden with his half- 
pint of nuts, or his farthing popgun — do you mean 
to tell me, I say, that you haven't noted, as I 
have, the little wretched, lonely, helpless, friend- 
less things crowd moodily together, and look at 
one another with the same kind of powerless and 
bewildered air as one sees in a flock of sheep 
gathered outside a butcher's door ? Come, come, 
friend, you're straining the bow a little toohard — 
a little too hard." 

" Well, perhaps you're right, friend," rejoined 
the master, in a conciliatory tone. "You, as a 
stranger, I dare say, icitt observe things that are 



THE LOWEST "BUNGS*' ON THE LADDER. 349 

lost upon old hands like us — and one forgets, 
no doubt, that it's as remarkable a thing here for 
a boy to have any friends at all, as it is for an out- 
of-doors boy to be without them. So I shouldn't 
wonder, now I come to think of it, but the rarity 
of a father or mother may in such cases as you say 
make some of the young hurchins here feel the 
misery of having no one whom they can become 
chargeable to. Yes, that there must be hun- 
pleasant to think of, certainly — not legally charge- 
able to any one. Besides, we all know," urged 
the master, as he endeavoured to fall in with the 
tone of Uncle Benjamin, "how the boys at other 
schools always feel for the one who never goes 
home to see his friends in the holidays ; and so 
here, I dare say, the great wonder of the time is 
the boy who has got any friends to wish to see 
him — especially in a place too where there can't 
be any holidays, you know, from the simple fact 
that there are no homes to go to. : ' 

"How shocking!"' shuddered Ben, with the 
sense of school and holidays fresh upon him ; " but 
I should like the poor boys better," he added, " if 
they seemed to feel their situation more, for realty 
they don't appear to me to care about it ; so 
then I say to myself, If they don't care about it, 
why should /?" 

" That's good, sound, sterling sense, if you like, 
my boy!" added the master, approvingly: and 
then drawing the little fellow close up to him, he 
said, as he bent down and placed his head close 
beside young Ben's, "Now, you see all those 
lads there in the red worsted comforters, my 
child ?" 

"Yes," said young Ben; and he was about to 
point towards them with his forefinger, but the 
master seized his hand, as the boy was in the 
act of raising it. 



350 YOUXG BEXJAMIX FRANKL1X 

""Well, lad," went on the other, "the parish 
allowance in the shape of neck-tie to fasten the 
shirt collar is merely a piece of black cotton shoe- 
ribbon; and that there red worsted comforter, 
to keep the throat and chest warm, has been 
bought by the friends of those boys who are 
lucky enough to have such a thing as a friend in 
the world. So now you can pick them out for 
yourself. No friends, no comforters ; d'ye see ?" 

It was terrible for the little soft-hearted fellow 
to be able to realize the orphanage of such a mul- 
titude in so visible and massive a manner ; and as 
his eye wandered over the quadrangle, he kept 
saying to himself, " Comforters, fathers and mo- 
thers ! — no fathers and mothers, no comforters !" 

" But I tell you, friend Franklin, what is to 
my mind really the most dreadful thing by far 
in connection with this kind of life ?" the master 
proceeded, " and. that is what we were talking about 
only the other day : that boys and girls brought 
up here have no idea of working in order to live. 
You know they see day after day — and, indeed, 
have seen ever since they first opened their eyes — ■ 
some hundred or so of people regularly supplied 
with their rations, and that without having any- 
thing to' pay or anything to do for the food. Do 
you know, I do verily believe, friend Franklin, 
that many even of our big boys here, and I'm sure 
almost all of our little ones, fancy that Nature sends 
breakfasts and suppers in the same way as she 
sends light and darkness ; and I'm nearly certain, 
if some of our in-doors boys were hard pushed on 
the matter, as to where bread or gruel came from, 
you'd find there was some vague idea in their 
minds that half-gallon loaves were dug up out of 
the ground, something in the same manner as 
they've seen the men, in their walks through the 
town, doing with the paving-stones in the streets ; 




' It ain't a far den, 'cos I seed a far den once."— P. 351. 



THE LOWEST " BUNGS " OX THE LADDER, 351 

and that gruel is as easily to be collected in tub- 
fuls as the rain-water is caught for our washing/* 7 

".What would they fancy a half-guinea was, 
think you, if they were to be shown one ?" asked 
Uncle Ben, as he drew the bit of gold out of the 
wash-leather bag he carried in his pocket. 

" Well, 'pon my word 1 can't say, friend Frank- 
lin. Farthings are great prizes here," returned 
the master, " and groats immense fortunes. But 
here, come here ! you ' Monday.' ' Monday, I 
say !' " the master shouted, as he beckoned to one 
of the foundlings, who had been named after 
the day of the week on which lie had been taken 
out of a hamper at the mail-coach office. 

And when poor iC Monday " had made his ap- 
pearance, and had been shown the bright yellow 
little disc of metal, and asked what he thought it 
was, he said, as he nibbed among the bristles of 
his scrubbing-brush crop of hair, and stood grin- 
ning as if he had been looking at a stale-tart tray for 
the first time in his life, " It ain't a farden, 'cos 
I seed a farden once in Dobb's hand, after his 
mother had been to see him, and she's got two 
and six a week, and half a gallon loaf out door, 
you know, sir, cos she takes in washing, and has 
the rheumatiz. No, no," and he shook his hand 
till you could almost fancy you heard it rattle, it 
seemed so empty, " it ain't thick enough, nor brown 
enough neither for a farden. Oh, I know now !" 
added the half-witted boy, looking up at the 
master, and grinning knowingly in his face. 

"Well, ' Monday,' what is it, eh ?" asked the 
master, as sharp and quickly as a mail-coach guard 
calls " a'right." 

The lad grinned again for a minute or two 
before answering, and then said, " Why, it's one 
of the brass buttons off some charity boy's leather 
breeches." 



-M 



352 YOUNG BENJAMIN FRANKLIN. 

Poor " Monday " — whose life, ever since he had 
"been taken out of his natal-hamper, had been 
hemmed in by the four high brick walls of the 
poor-house, and who, had he heard by chance of 
the upper, middle, and lower classes of society, 
would have fancied it pointed out the distinction 
between overseers, out-doors people, and in-doors 
people — the poor lad was told " that would do," 
and " he might go ;" and directly his back was 
turned the master began rolling about in a very 
convulsion of pent-up laughter — declaring he had 
never heard anything half so funny in all his life. 
But Uncle Ben, and even his little nephew saw 
in the worldly ignorance of poor " Monday," some- 
thing far too grave to be merry over ; so the god- 
father and the godson looked sorrowfully at each 
other, and each knew by the tenderness of the 
glance the thoughts that were stirring in the other's 
heart. 

" Oh, I'm wanted, I see, up in the infirmary! 
Ah, I thought that port wine would be thrown 
away ! so you'll excuse me, friend Franklin, will 
you ?" said the Master, as he shook the other by 
the hand. " Drop in whenever you're passing, 
will you ? for I shall always be glad to talk over 
these matters with you. Good-bye, my fine little 
fellow. Good-bye, friend ;" and as Uncle Ben said 
something to him aside, he added, " Oh, yes! of 
course, I shall be happy to give you a letter to the 
governor. Good-bye, I wouldn't leave you, but I 
have to see about the shell and things, you know." 
" Come along, Ben," cried the uncle, pulling his 
waistcoat down as the master hurried from them ; 
but though the old man began to move, the little 
fellow seemed in no way disposed to follow. 
' ; Come, Ben, I say, there's the jail to see yet," he 
added, as he turned round and found the boy still 
in the same spot. 



" LOWER AND LOWER STILL." 353 

The little fellow jerked his head as the uncle 
looked back at him. The old man understood the 
signal, and returned to the Boy's side. 

" Whisper," said young Ben. 

The elder Benjamin stooped down and put his 
ear close to the lad's lips, and as he caught what 
the other said, the old man smiled to hear the 
words. 

" Oh, certainly !" said Uncle Ben. 

The next minute the little fellow was scamper- 
ing after poor " Monday," and the minute after, 
scampering back again to his uncle, who stood 
watching him at the gate. 

" Give me your hand, my little man," said the 
godfather to young Ben ; and as the boy did so, 
the old man shook it as if Ms heart teas in his palm : 
and then on the couple toddled — 

To the jail. 



GHAPTEE XX. 

'LOWER and lower still. 5: 



From the poor-house to the jail some think it is not 
a very great remove — at least some social topo- 
graphers would have us believe so. 

But such people throw all the refuse of society 
together into one confused heap, which they call 
"the dangerous classes:" and it is only your 
pickers-up of unconsidered trifles that pause 
to separate the rags from the bones. 

The agricultural poacher is not more distinct 
from the civic pickpocket, than is the stock- 
pauper from the stock-thief, or the dull-witted and 
half-fatuous beggar— for instance— from the cunning 
and adventurous sharper; and such is the caste 

2 A 



uO± YOUNG BENJAMIN FEANKLIN. 

and cliquery in even the " has monde" that a 
" cracksman " would no more think of fraternizing 
with a "shallow cove" than a barrister would 
dream of hobnobbing with an attorney, or even a 
"wholesale" venture to return the call of a 
"retail," in the petty circle of suburban exclu- 
siveness. 

The jail that Uncle Ben took his godson to see 
was the jail proper. It had the fashionable 
gigantic stone gate, with festoons and tassels of 
fetters by way of ornamental work arranged over 
the doorway; and enormous unwieldy doors, 
knobbed over with square-headed nails, as thickly 
as the sole of a navigator's boot ; and punctuated 
with a couple of huge lions-head knockers, that re- 
minded one of the masks in a pantomime. The 
walls were as high as those of a racket-ground ; 
and all along the top of them extended a long 
bristly-hog' s-mane, as it were, of chevaux de /rise, 
that looked like a hedge of bayonets. 

Uncle Ben and the boy were admitted through 
an opening in the -larger gate, and went in, duck- 
ing their heads under the aperture somewhat 
after the manner of fowls entering a hen roost. 

"Lett'r for th' gov'nor," shouted the military-' 
looking gatekeeper in a sharp military tone, as he 
handed the note Uncle Ben had brought with him 
to a stray warder, or turnkey as they were called 
in those days. 

The official disappeared with the document, 
and the old man and the boy were asked to step 
into the gate-room while they awaited the answer. 

" Just look, uncle," said the lad in a whisper as 
he entered the place almost with fear and trem- 
bling, "just look at the blunderbusses and cut- 
lasses all chained together up there ;" there 
were several rows of the clumsy brass-barrelled 
pieces and knobby-handled swords arranged over 



" LOWER AND LOWER STILL." 355 

the fireplace : " and look at the lot of handcuffs 
and irons too ; just look how tastily they're ar- 
ranged — all over the walls, I declare:*' and he 
wheeled round and round, taken with the set 
patterns and bright glitter of the well-polished 
manacles, that had been embroidered as It were into 
all kinds of lineal devices on every side of the cell- 
like lodge. There were swivel handcuffs, that 
looked like big horses' bits, and close-linked chains, 
like horses' curbs ; the one strung after the fashion 
of keys on enormous rings, and the other hanging 
in great hanks like so much iron yarn. The upper 
part of the walls again were garlanded round 
with leg-irons and ankle-cuffs ; and there were iron 
neck-pieces that were like heavy muffin-tins, and 
iron waistbands that were almost as thick as the 
ring to an Indiaman's anchor. Some of the 
human harness seemed to have been made — so 
massive was the style of ironmongery — for the 
renowed race of Cornish giants ; for a few of the 
manacles were literally as large as the handle to 
a navigator's spade ; while others, again, were such 
mere miniature things, that they looked positively 
as if they were meant for babies — being no bigger 
in compass than a little girl's bracelet, though 
twenty times heavier; and the sight of these set 
one thinking, either that the juvenile offenders 
must be very strong and desperate, or the jailers 
very pusillanimous and weak. 

" Oh my !" cried Ben, as he made the tour of 
the room, and halted in front of an enormous long 
pole, with an immense crutch covered with leather 
at the end of it, and which had somewhat the ap- 
pearance of a Brobdignagian pitchfork * " what 
ever can that be for, uncle V 

The gatekeeper, standing at the door, overheard 
the question, and turned round for a minute to ex- 
plain the use of the article. " That, my lad," saic 7 

if a 2 



356 YOUNG BENJAMIN FRANKLIN. 

the man, as he kept his eyes still fixed on the 
door while he spoke, and broke off every now 
and then to answer the gate, " is to prevent any 
of the prisoners injuring the officers in their cells. 
'Casionally, you see, the fellors gets furious when 
they're locked up alone in the 'fractory ward, and 
swears they'll stick us with their knives, or beat 
our skulls in with their hammock rings if we 
only chance to go in to them ; and we can see by 
their looks as they means it too. Well, in such cases, 
one of us puts on that great big shield you 
see there," and the officer pointed to a leathern 
disc larger in diameter than the largest target. 
" It's as big round as a man's high, and made of 
basket-work, and well padded, and covered with 
buffalo hide. So, when the officer sees his op- 
portunity, he dashes into the cell with that there 
thrust out in front of him, and covering his whole 
body. This takes the chap aback a bit, and before 
he can recover hisself, another officer darts in, 
holding out that long pole there with the padded 
crutch at the end of it, and with that he anakes a 
drive at the fellor, and pins him round the body 
close again the wall ; and then another officer, 
armed with that there smaller crutch, rushes on 
directly after the other, and pinions the chap's 
legs in the same manner. So when they've got 
the fellor fast and tight, then all the other 
officers in the prison pours in, and overpowers 
him altogether. That is what that pretty-looking 
little happy ratus is for, my young gentleman." 

Young Benjamin, who had been staring with 
the same sapient, round-eyed kind of expression as 
an owl in a bird-cage, all the time the man had 
been speaking, merely said, " Oh !" when the story 
was ended,- and wondered whether, if poor half- 
witted " Monday" ever got in there, he'd be ma- 
nacled, and fettered, and pitch-forked like the rest. 



"LQWEK A.XD LOWER STILL.' 3o7 

By this time a warder returned, and putting his 
hand to his cap, saluted the elder Benjamin in 
military fashion, as he said, partly to the gate- 
keeper and partly to the gentleman himself, 
44 Pass two — 'spect prison — Goy'ner's orders." 
Then beckoning the gatekeeper to one side, the 
officer seemed to take the ramrod out of his back 
while he said in a whisper, "You'll find a half- 
gallon of rum, Bennett " (and he winked as rapidly 
as a bird at the man), " at the bottom of the bread 
when it comes in this evening ; just pass it for 
me, will you, and you shall have your regulars. 
I'll square it with you by-and-by." Then sud- 
denly turning round and assuming the military 
air again, he cried, " Xow, sir, pliz, foller me — 
'spect prison*" 

The man, who wore many heavy keys chained 
round his waist, was about to apply one of them 
to a huge lock (as big as a family Bible), and to 
open a gate in a thick trellis-work of iron railings 
that was as ponderous as a portcullis, when 
Uncle Ben suggested, that he wished more par- 
ticularly to see the boys' part of the prison ; 
saying, that the master of the poor-house had told 
him that their new Quaker governor was begin- 
ning to try and keep the juvenile from the old 
offenders. 

' ' Yezzir — all stuff though — never carry it out — ■ 
new-fangled nonsense ; been here twenty year, 
I have — been together all my time, they have — no 
harm came of it as I can see. Nothing like dis- 
'pline — stric' dis'pline ; yezzir — that's all we want 
here, sir — dis'pline — stric' dis'pline." 

Then putting his two hands to the heavy gate 
he had been standing at, while he jerked out the 
above speech, he made it moan again as he turned 
it slowly on its hinges. 

Ben was now in a kind of bird-cage of iron 



358 YOUNG BENJAMIN FEANKLIN. 

bars ; and another gate, with another huge family- 
biblical lock, had to be undone before he entered 
the paved yard of the prison itself. 

Once within the precincts, the place was like 
a fortress, with its heavy blocks of buildings and 
embrasure-like windows, all radiating from the 
"argus" or governor's house in the centre, like 
the threads of a gigantic spider's web done in 
brickwork. The doors to the different prison 
wings were as massive as those of an iron safe ; 
while each of the different " airing-yards " was 
railed off like the entrance to some gloomy and 
desolate Inn of court. 

The warder and the visitors passed on to the 
oakum-room, which had been built across the end 
of the large triangular space between the last 
two prison wings ; or rather the last two bricken 
spokes of the architectural wheel. This room 
consisted of a long barn-like shed, fitted with seats, 
which ranged from one end of the lengthy out- 
house to the other, and which stood on a slightly- 
inclined plane ; so that altogether it bad somewhat 
the appearance of a rude stand run up, for th.Q 
nonce, at a race-course. The air here was charged 
with the true prison perfume, and reeked as 
strongly of the tarry and hempen odour of rope- 
yarn mixed with a whiff of stale cocoa, gruel, and 
pea-soup, as a circus smells of oranges and saw- 
dust. 

Here were some hundred of mere children, 
ranged along the forms, each with a hook tied 
just above the knee, and u fiddling away," as the 
prison phrase ran, at a small thread of the un- 
ravelled junk ; that is to say, sawing it backwards 
and forwards across the hook, and then rolling 
the loosened strand to and fro along their thigh, 
where the trousers seemed to' be coated with 
glue, from the tar with which they had become 



"LOWEK AND LOWEtt STILL." 3-39 

-covered. The whole atmosphere within the room 
was hazy, as that of the interior of a mill, 
with the dust of the abraded tow flying in the 
air. A death-like, catacomb-like silence reigned 
throughout the place; and round the shed sat 
a small detachment of prison officials, perched at 
intervals on high, lawyer's - clerk - like stools, 
watching the lads at work ; while here and there 
upon the walls hung black boards covered with 
Scripture texts, such as — 

" I WILL ARISE AND GO TO MY FATHER, AXD SAY 

unto him, Father, I have sinned against Heaven: 

AND BEFORE THEE." 

And ' ; Set a watch, Lord, before my mouth, 

AND KEEP THE DOOR OF MY LIPS," &C. &C. 

As the trio entered the shed, the whole of the 
boys rose in a body to salute them, and each put 
his hand across his forehead, like a person shading 
his eyes as he looks up on a bright sunny day. 
They then sat down immediately afterwards, the 
one simultaneous movement sounding like the 
breaking of a huge wave upon the sea-shore. 

" Hard labour pris'nus, sir, most of 'em !" said 
the chief warder, still jerking out the information 
in the same snappy tone, as if he were giving the 
word of command. " B'ys all in gray, Sum'iy 
b'ys,"* went on the communicant, with his chin 
in the air as before. " B'ys in gray, with yeller 
collus to weskets, Seshuns b'ys,"j* and b'ys in 
blue here on lower fo'm, 31is'meenuns."J 

Little Ben hardly heard the words, and the 

* Summary boys, i.e., those who had been summarily com- 
mitted by magistrates, without being sent to the sessions for 
trial. 

f Anglice, Sessions boys, or those who had been tried and 
convicted of larceny or felony at the sessions. 

% Properly called "Misdemeanants," or boys that were 
imprisoned for some misdemeanour ; that is to say, that had 
not committed any theft or serious offence. 



360 YOUNG BENJAMIN FRANKLIN. 

■uncle cared not to inquire into the precise niceties 
of the legal distinctions. 

The boy was rapt — entranced — stunned, as it 
were, with the utter novelty of the place and 
scene before hirn. He had heard talk of robbers, 
and had certainly read of Eobin Hood and his 
band of freebooters in Sherwood forest ; but he 
had never seen more than the back of a thief in 
all his life before, and that was when an alarm 
had been raised in their street one night, and he 
had caught sight, on throwing open his window, 
of a troop of watchmen hurrying along, in chase 
of a nimble pair of legs in the distance. Still, to 
the lad there had always been a world of vague 
terror in the mere idea of such characters. He 
had formed an imaginative picture of wild lawless 
ruffianism, and cut- throat ogrish propensities and 
appearance, in connection with the predatory class 
in general, and this had often, when the window- 
sashes of his bedchamber rattled in their frames, 
caused him to lie and tremble in his bed by the- 
hour ; so that now, the utter difference between the 
real and the ideal positively confounded him. 
Gould it be that the little children before him were 
really thieves — little mannikin things like them — 
that were not only the very opposite in appearance 
to ogres, cut-throats, and ruffians, but mere babies, 
most of them ; and who seemed to require a nurse, 
rather than a jailer, to watch over them ? Was it 
for the safe custody of such mere Tom-Thumb crea- 
tures as these, that the half-military prison officials 
went about, with those heavy bunches of keys 
chained round their waist? Was it for these 
wretched toddlekins, who seemed to need a go-cart , 
instead of a prison van, to bring them to the 
jail, that the cutlasses were chained up over the 
mantelpiece in the gate-room, and those tiny, 
baby-handcuffs kept, ever ready, hanging against 



" LOWER AXD LOWER STILL." 361 

the walls ? Did those little hands, that had 
hardly outgrown their dimples for knuckles, need 
a fortress to resist them ? did they want iron 
doors as heavy as sepulchre-stones, and iron bars 
and bolts as thick as musket-barrels, and walls 
as high as cliffs, to keep them from breaking pri- 
son ? What could it all mean ? Surely, he thought, 
as he turned it over and over, it must be the mad- 
house that his uncle had brought him to ; so as to 
have a bit of fun with him, and see whether he'd 
know the sane from the insane. Yet no ! What 
could those poor boys be there for, if the men in 
authority over them were really so many lunatics ? 
Could they be the poor idiot lads that the grown 
maniacs were allowed to play the fool with ? It 
really seemed to be so. But no, no : the little 
fellows hadn't the idiot look with them, like the 
wretched silly boys he had seen in the poor-house. 
Besides, the warder himself had called it a prison. 
What could it all mean? 

Then poor bewildered little Ben began, as the 
whirl and confusion in his brain, and the singing 
of the blood in his ears subsided a little, to glance 
his eye fitfully along the forms, and notice the 
features of such lads as had resumed their work — 
after having had their fill of staring at himself. 
He could see no difference in their looks from his 
old playmates at Mr. Brownwell's school. Some one 
or two were positively pretty lads — good-look- 
ing in the literal sense of the term — and seemed, 
despite the ugly gray prison-dress, to have faces 
beaming with frankness and innocence. Others 
certainly looked dogged and sullen, and many had 
a sharp, knowing, and half- sly expression, with a 
" curl at the corners of their mouth and a twinkle in 
their eye, as if they were ready to burst into 
laughter on the least occasion ; but not one could 
he see that had that sinister averted scowl, and 



362 YOUNG BENJAMIN FRANKLIN. 

those heavy bull-dog-like features, that were made 
to characterize the thieves in the pictures of some 
of his schoolfellows' hooks. Were these then really 
thieves before him — little baby felons and convicts 
in pinafores ? Yet, still he fancied he must have mis- 
understood his uncle somehow. Why, there was one 
poor child there in gray, with a yellow collar to his 
waistcoat, that wasn't bigger than little Teddy 
Holmes, his sister Buth's eldest boy; and TedcTv 
was only just turned five he knew. They could 
never have tried him, and made a convict of such 
a mere babe as he was ; for if they made felons of 
little things of five years old, why not at four, at 
three ? — or, indeed, why should the baby in long 
clothes go free, if it came to that ? How could 
such a mere infant as that lad possibly know right 
from wrong ; any more than Tommy, their cat at 
home — and he really was a dreadful thief, if you 
liked ? 

But poor young Ben's speculations and bewil- 
derment were soon put an end to, by his uncle 
asking the chief warder what was the character of 
the offence for which the misdemeanants— the boys 
in blue on the lower form — had been imprisoned. 

" Stan' up, mis'meenuns," cried the chief warder, 
as if he had been drilling a body of privates. 

The boys rose in a row, as though they had been 
all hoisted by their necks at one pull ; and there 
they stood, with their hands straight down by their 
sides, and their chins cocked in the air ; the very 
monkey mimicry of the antics of the chief warder 
himself. 

4 ' What a'yer in for, b'y ?" squirted out the officer, 
addressing the first lad in the rank. 

' 'Heaving a highster shell through a street 
lamp, please sir," was the urchin's reply. 

Ben stared at his uncle, as the answer fell upon 
his ear. 



" LOWER AND LOWER STILL." 363 

"In thii-tiines afore," added the officer, by 
way of comment. " The b'y did it to get a month's 
food an' shelter, dussay." 

44 An' yon?" went on the warder, passing to the ' 
next. 

"Please sir, a woman said I hit her babby," 
whined out this one. 

" An' yon ?" the warder continued, running 
down the rank. 

" Heaving clay about, please sir," responded the 
next. 

"In fo'teen times afore," the officer threw in, 
as a commentary on the character of this lad. 

" It's been mostly for cadging (begging), please 
sir," expostulated the brat, " and only two times 
for prigging, please sir." 

" Sil'ns, b'y. Xex' b'y go on," shonted the man 
in authority. 

"Heaving stones," said Xo. 4*. 

"Threatening to stab another boy, please sir," 
3iied the lad after Xo. 4, as the warder pointed to 
him. 

"Prigging a bell in a garding, please sir/' ex- 
claimed No. 6. 

" Heaving stones, sir," went on Xo. 7. 

" Heaving stones too," Xo. 8 said. 

"In fur times afore," again interposed the 
warder. 

" Heaving stones," ejaculated Xo. 9. 

" The same," answered Xo. 10. ■ 

And there the tile ended. 

" Heaving stones ! Heaving stones ! Heaving 
stones!" The words echoed and echoed again in 
young Ben's brain : and then, in the natural sym- 
pathy and justice of his little heart, he cried aloud, 
* ' Oh, uncle ! do they put these poor little fellows 
among thieves, and lock them up in this horrid 
place, and make them wear that ugly prison-dress, 



364 YOOTG BENJAMIN FRANKLIN. 

for such, mere child's-play as that? Isn't it a 
shame ! Why, there wasn't a boy at our school that 
shouldn't have been here then, if all were punished 
alike. Oh, isn't it a shame, a wicked shame !" he 
repeated. " Why, I remember myself," and the 
lad was pouring forth a torrent of generous boyish 
indignation, and would have run on for heaven 
knows how long, hadn't the chief warder cut him 
short, with one of his peculiarly explosive com- 
mands in the shape of . 

" Sil'ns, sir, pliz. Can't allow such remuks as 
them in pressuns of pris'nus." 

Young Ben was tongue-tied in an instant, and 
he drew up close to his uncle's side ; for he hardly 
knew whether, if" heaving clay about" was punish- 
able with imprisonment, he too mightn't have ren- 
dered himself liable to be locked up by what he 
had said. 

"Now," exclaimed Uncle Ben to the warder, 
"let's hear the offences of some of the others," 

"Stan up, you b'y, ther'," shouted the officer, 
addressing the first of the lads in gray seated on 
the next form. 

The boy shot up from his seat in an instant, as 
sharply and suddenly as a Jack in the box, on the 
removal of the lid; and stood as stiff as a dummy 
in the window of a " youth's fashionable clothing 
mart." 

" H'ould a' yer, b'y.?" said the jailer, questioning 
the lad first as to his age.. 

" Thirteen year, please sir," was the answer. 

" What a' y'in for ?" went on the laconic turn- 
key. 

" Coat and umbereller, please sir," the little 
fellow replied with a faint smile ; and then added, 
as if he knew what would be the next query, M This 
makes seven times here, please sir, and three times 
at the Old Hoss, please sir." 



" LOWER AXD LOWER STILL." 365 

The " Old Horse" was the cant name for the 
next county jail. 

" Hollong ha'yer got this time ?" demanded the 
warder, so as to make him state the term of his 
imprisonment. 

• ; Three calendar, please sir " (Anglice, three 
calendar months). " This makes four times, please 
sir, as I've had to do three calendar," said the 
lad ; " and I've had two two-monthses as well — one 
of the two-monthses here, and one at the Old 
Hoss, please sir ; and I've done one six weeks and 
two two-dayses besides. It's mostly been for 
prigging, please sir," added the young urchin. 

Little Ben stared with amazement, at his uncle, 
as he heard the confession, uttered as it was with 
out the faintest tinge of shame to colour the cheeks 
(ay, and what struck him as still more strange) 
without the least quake of fear — even though the 
warder stood at the boy's elbow. 

"Woddid yer tek?" shot out the official, now 
drawing the lad out as to the kind of articles he 
had been in the habit of stealing. 

"I took a watch and chain wunst, please sir; 
and I did a pair of goold bracelets another time," 
was the unabashed and half-exulting reply. " I 
frisked a till twice'd ; and this time it's for the coat 
and umbereller, as I told you on afore. One of the 
two-dayses I had was for a bottle of pickles, but 
that was three or four year ago." 

" TVhy, I beginned thieving about four year 
ago," he went on in answer to another question 
from the officer, who seemed as pleased as the boy 
himself with the examination. " I went out with 
a butcher : boy. He's got seven year on it now, 
please sir. He sent me into the shop with a bit 
of a hold seal to sell, when I prigged the stoop " 
(stole the watch) ; " and I tried on the same dodge 
when I did the pair of goold bracelets. 



366 YOUNG BENJAMIN FRANKLIN. 

" Have you got any father, my lad ?" asked 
Uncle Ben, with a hitch in his breath. 

"Yes, please sir," the answer ran. "Mother 
mends glass and chayney, please siiy and father's in 
the consumptive hospital down in the country. I 
don't mean to go out prigging no mofe, please 
sir," added the youngster, as he suddenly lowered 
his eyelids with affected penitence, " not if I can 
get any other work that'll keep me. I won't."* 

"Won' do, b'3^ !" cried the inexorable warder; 
"yer pitched that ther' tale to the lady as went 
over the pris'n las' time we had yer here; an' 
then yer got three calen'ar the second day after 
yer went out." 

Little Ben was heart-stricken with what he 
heard. It was all so new to him— so startling — so 
shameless — so frank, and yet so subtle — so heartless, 
and yet so knowing ; in a word, it was so utterly 
unlike all his preconceptions concerning robbers 
and thieves, that now that he was really convinced 
he was standing in the presence of a host of boy- 
felons, he felt sick and half scared with the terrible 
consciousness of the fact. 

There was such a sense of massiveness in the 
large array of crime before him, that, now the boy 
had learnt that the greater part of the mere 
children were there for thefts as brazen-faced 
as those which the urchin of thirteen had just 
confessed to, he was fairly appalled with the vast- 
ness of the vice. Few, indeed, know what it is to 
see crime in the mass — wickedness in the lump, as 
it were ; to look upon some hundred heads, and 
feel as if they were fused into one monster brain, 

* There is no fiction in the above answers of the boys. 
These, and those which follow, are simply the replies ; of 
the young thieves at the boys' prison in Westminster, which 
were taken down verbatim by the author, at the time of his 
visit to Tothill Fields' House of Correction in the year 185G, 



" LOWEB AXD LOWER STILL." 367 

instinct with a hundred devil-power, and quickened 
with a hundredfold' more than ordinary human 
cunning and cheateiy. Most people know, crime 
only as an exceptional thing ; they heaT, read of, 
or become personally acquainted with merely 
individual cases, and never see it in such huge 
conglomerates — such immense corporate bodies of 
devilry as give the mind a foretaste of the concrete 
wickedness of pandemonium itself. It is no longer 
one wayward human heart we contemplate, but 
hundreds of such hearts ; every one of them pulsing, 
like a hundred clocks, in terrible unison, throbbing 
with one universal rancour and hatred of all that 
is good and grand ; and never a generous passion 
nor a noble sentiment, and hardly a kindly feeling 
stirring within them. Crime seen under such cir- 
cumstances seems to be as much a part of the " ordi 
nations of nature " as even gravitation itself, and 
a sense of destiny and fatalism almost overpowers 
the soul. 

As for poor little Ben, there was such a kind of 
rattlesnake fascination in the terror that was on 
him, that he couldn't for the life of him take his 
eyes off the lad who had just sat down. 

The boy was a sharp -featured and sly-looking 
youngster of about Ben's own height, and had a 
pucker and twitter about the corners of his mouth 
which showed, despite his downcast look, that 
though pretended penitence was on his eyelids, 
incipient laughter was on his lips. Indeed, he 
needed, but to have the prison garb exchanged for 
the man's coat, with the tails dragging on the 
ground, and the trousers tied up over the shoulders 
with string instead of braces, and the bare muddy 
feet too, to mark him as one of the confirmed young 
street-vagabonds that are to be found in every city. 
Were these the poor little human waifs and strays 
of the town, that Ben had so often seen collected at 



368 YOUNG BENJAMIN FEANKLIN. 

the entrances to the courts and alleys about the 
neighbourhood ? he asked himself, without shaping 
the thoughts into words. Were these the slips 
and cuttings that, after being duly inoculated and 
planted, and transplanted into the hot-bed prison 
soils, were destined to bear the felon fruit ? As 
the light burst through the parting clouds of his 
brain, his mind's eye grew half dazed with the 
flash. 

He looked again and again at the lad, and tried 
if he could read innate wickedness branded like 
the mark of Cain upon his brow. But no ! The 
boy-thief, now that he came to gaze at him well, 
was the very image of Bob Cooper, who was the 
kindest and best-natured boy of them all at Mr. 
Brown well's school. Then the recollection that the 
father of the young thief was in the hospital, and 
the mother out all day mending " chayney and 
glass," came stealing over his heart, as soft and 
genial as the warm south wind on a winter's day ; 
and as his nature melted, young Ben thought, 
what would that boy-thief have been had he been 
blessed with friends and counsellors like himself ? 
and what might he himself have become had the 
same iron circumstances cradled his childhood ? 
The thought once in the little fellow's brain, and he 
looked upon the crowd of boy-thieves before him 
through the liquid lens of pity flooding his eyes. 

" Stan' up nex' boy !" again snapped out the 
prison official. 

This boy knew by the questions put to the 
previous one," the kind of information he had to 
give ; so directly he was on his feet, he put his 
hands straight down by hjs side, and raising his 
chin, and looking directly before him, he delivered 
himself of the following statement, almost in one 
breath, and certainly in one sentence : — 

Sixteen year old please sir and in for a stealing 



" LOWEK AND LOWER STILL.' 3 3G9 

a coat I've been a prigging about four year I clone 
one calendar here for a pair of boots and four 
calendar at the Old Hoss for prigging a tray of silver 
pencil-cases the way as I prigged that there was 
this here I took a hold aypenny ring and broke it np 
and went into a shop to ax whether it were goold 
or not and while the gennelman was a looking at 
it I slips the teiy of pencil-cases under my coat 
then I got took for two bundles of cigars and did 
another month here after that I was took for some 
meresome pipes and had another month on it 
here I was took for a coat besides and done my 
three calendar at the Old Hoss again for that 
father's a hingineer and I aint got no mother 
please sir and that's all.'' 

"Wait, boy !" cried Uncle Ben, as he saw the 
lad about to resume his seat ; ' ' what do you mean 
to do when you leave here ?" 

" Do !" echoed the young thief, as. if he was 
astonished at such a question being put to him. 

" Yes, lad," repeated the elder Benjamin ; " what 
do you mean to do ?" 

" Why, when I gets out here I shall go prigging 
again, in coorse," was the candid and fearless 
reply of the lad, as he looked the warder full in 
the face. 

"But why," inquired the old man, "why will 
you thieve rather than work, lad ?" 

" Why, coz I don't know no other way of getting 
a living honestly," he answered, with an ill-used 
air. 

The odd blunder set every one in the prison 
laughing, officers and all, except the head turnkey 
himself, and he merely shouted out — 

" Sil'ns, b'ys ! we can't ha' no laughing here !•' 
and when the place was quiet, the warder added 
as before, " Stan' up nex' b'y." 

M Been fourteen times in prison," began the lad 

2 B 



OlO YOUNG BENJAMIN FRANKLIN. 

of his own accord, as lie rose from his seat. -" I've 
had three calendar in this here prison four times, 
and one fonrteen-days, and I don't know how many 
two-monthses and one-monthses besides." 

Uncle Benjamin could no longer bear to hear 
the boys recount their several imprisonments, with 
all the glory with which an old soldier fights his 
" battles o'er again ;" so he cut this lad's state- 
ment short by asking what alone the old man cared 
to know. " And when you leave this prison, you'll 
begin thieving again, I suppose ?" 
' " 2so, I ain't a-going this time," answered the 
lad, in a dogged tone. 

" Indeed !" exclaimed the old man. 

Ci JSo," went on the other, " I means to hook it, 
and go to sea." 

It was now time to pass from the salient details 
of .the foreground, into the broad masses and 
deeper tones of the general view. So Uncle Ben 
began to inquire as to ages, rather than the cri- 
minal histories of the different boy-prisoners ; for 
he knew that the mere years of the children im- 
prisoned there would tell a far sadder tale than 
they themselves could recount. 

" What is the age of the youngest prisoner you 
have here, officer?" said he, addressing himself 
to the head turnkey. 

"Fi' ye'rs," exploded the official, with all the 
callousness of true routine. " Stan' up, you Tom 
Tit there," he cried, addressing the child by 
the nick-name he had got in the prison ; and 
immediately a little head of short-cropped hair 
popped up at the back of some of the bigger boy- 
thieves in the front row. " Ther', get on the 
form, do, and let's see you a bit," added the chief 
warder. 

The mannikin scrambled up on the bench 
as he was ordered ; and little Ben shuddered, as 



" LOWER AXD LOWES STILL." 371 

lie saw the mere babe stand there grinning in the 
felon's suit of gray, that hung about him like a 
sick man's clothes. 

" Secon' time o' being here," went on the disci- 
plinarian. ;i In for stealing — what's yer 'fence ?" 
he asked, sharply. 

The child grinned again, as he lisped out, 
" Frithking a till, pleathe." 

" Woddicl yer tek?" demanded the other. 

" Five bob and a tanner, thir," was the urchin 
thief s reply. 

"Fi' and sixpuns, he means," went on the 
officer, acting as a glossary to the baby's slang. 
"Ther, that'll do; stan' down. That's the 
youngest we've had for some time. But I've 
knowed a child o' six sent to the hulks, I have — ■ 
though he cud hardly say * not g'i'tty ' when he 
was tried." 

Uncle Ben wouldn't trust himself to speak upon 
such a matter, in such a place ; so he bit his lips 
to keep back the words that were burning for 
utterance at the tip of his tongue ; and he frowned 
and shook his head at Iris little godson, as he saw 
the boy in his indignation scowling and making 
mouths at the warder before him. 

" Want th' ages of so' more, sir, eh ?" the official 
asked ; and as the uncle gave a nod in reply, he 
cried, 

,; Xone here eight yer old — nor nine : let's see," 
the man said, talking to himself — " ten's the nex' 
youngest we got — isn't it, Corrie ?" he inquired of 
one of the other warders near him. 

The man addressed shot up from his seat, 
•as he replied, "Yezzir!" in a voice that made 
the pl&C3 echo again as with the report of a pistol 

"Stan' up now, all ten ye'r boys," shouted out 
the head turnkey, authoritatively : and the words 
were no sooner uttered than the lads rose from 



6CA YOU-N'G BENJAMIN FJt&ANKLlN. 

different parts of the room. " Ther' they a' sir," 
he added — "one! two! three! four! five! Fi' 
ten-yer b'ys ; and three on them in once afore ; 
others firs' 'fence b'ys." 

"What are they here for?" Uncle Ben sought 
to learn. 

" What a yer in for ?" said the man, pointing first 
to the one nearest at hand, and then to the others, 
while the answers of the lads ran successively 
thus : — " Pick-pocketing — stealing brass — stealing 
seven razors — taking tuppence — spinning a top." 

" What's that?" asked Uncle Ben ; " surely that 
lad didn't say he was here for spinning a top ?" 

" Yezzir ; reg'lar 'fence that! a boy gets one 
calendar for it, if he's took up for 'structing the 
king's highway, sir;" such was the information 
that came like a thunder- clap upon the two Benja- 
mins ; and the younger couldn't help throwing up 
his little honest hands, and tossing his good- 
natured head, in the depth of his pity for the poor 
little suffering things before him. 

" Stan' up all 'leven-yer b'ys now," was the 
next order; and when it had been obeyed, his 
man proceeded to tell them off with his finger as 
before. " Sev'n b'ys here!" then he said,g " One 
in ten times afore ; another six times ; nother 
five ; the res' stranjus and firs' 'fence by's ?" 

Uncle Ben nodded ; and again the warder cried, 
" What a' y' in for, b'y ?" and went pointing to the 
lads in succession, and drawing from them the 
following answers, one after another, as he did 
so : — ■ 

" Taking a silver kettle — stealing pigeons — 
spinning a top (the two Benjamins again looked 
at each other) — begging— killing a dog — sleeping 
in the public gardens (another exchange of glances) 
— stealing a tray of go old rings." 

"Now twel'-yer old b'ys, sir, eh?" again in- 



'•'LOWER AND LOWER STILL. 3*3 

quired the warder : and as the uncle nodded again, 
np shot ten more boys ; and their offences were 
found, in the same manner as before, to have been : 
"pickpocketing — stealing a coat — pawning a 
jacket — stealing lead — pickpocketing — stealing 
meat— breaking a window — stealing agooldwatch 
and chain — stealing bread" ("You didn't want 
it, b'y, eh?" " Oh no, sir; meant to sell it," was 
the parenthetical inquiry and answer) — " and steal- 
ing brass." 

And when all the offences had been stated, the 
warder added, by way of comment, "Pickpockets 
here all old hands. One in six times afore. On'y 
two stranjus 'mong the whole twel' b'ys. See 
any mo', sir ?"* 

Uncle Ben shook his head ; and then said 
" Stay," as he cast his eyes upon the ground. 
" Yes," he went on, " I should like to know how 
many of the boys here have no fathers or mothers 
to take care of them." 

The words were hardly out of the old man's 
mouth before the warder had made the building 
ring with the command of " Stan' up boys with no 
fathers and mothers !" and then, as he saw one lad 
rising whose parents he knew to be living, he 
bawled out, " What a' yer doing there, b'y? 
You're not a no father an' mother !" 

"Please, sir," cried the lad in return, " I'm a 
no mother, sir — I got a step', please sir." 

" Well, si' down then ! It'll come to yer turn 
nex' :" and as the lad did as he was bidden, the 
warder went on counting again, and ended by say- 
ing — " Ther' they a' sir. Fi' no fathers an' 
mothers." 

" Five utterly destitute !" muttered Fncie Ben, 

* The remarks made in the note to page 366, apply also 
to the above statements. They arc matters of fact, rather 
than imagination. 



374 YOUNG BENJAMIN FRANKLIN. 

as lie felt his heart drop like a stone in his bosom. 
His little godson stared at him with all the be- 
wilderment of utter horror ; for he knew well 
what was passing in the old man's mind. 

" Now, sir, I s'pose you'll take the boys with 
a father or a mother on'y, eh ?" suggested the 
official ; and as he saw the other nod assent once 
more, he bellowed out the order ; bnt such a mul- 
titude of young ones rose at the word of command, 
that the warder knew half of them had mistaken 
the summons. So he kept shouting to those he 
was in doubt about, " Now, b'y, a' yer a father or 
a mother, eh ?" whereupon the urchin would 
answer, either that he was " a mother," or " a 
father," as it might happen ; or else that he was 
" both a father and mother too ;" in which latter 
case he would be told to " si' down and pay more 
"tention, or he'd get in the 'fract'ry cell if he didn 
mind." 

" Ther' they a' sir at last," again cried the man in 
authority. " Fifteen no father ! Twel' no mother !" 

" Please sir, my father and mother's supperated," 
shouted one of the bigger boys; "and mine's in 
the poor'us, please sir," cried another; "and 
mine's gone to sea ;" " and my mother's been in 
the 'ospital for the last year, with dickey " (decay) 
"of the thigh-bone;" and so they went on, each 
shouting out after the other, as if they fancied 
some wrong had been done to them, in not being 
allowed to stand up as orphans beside the others. 

"Sil'ns!" shouted the warder; "we can't ha' 
this here !" 

Uncle Ben went up to the official, and said,^ 
thoughtfully, " I want to find out how many of 
these boys have got relatives in prison." 

"Oh, a'most all on 'em, sir," was the . laconic 
reply ; " regular jailbirds, greater part on 'em ; 
but I'll see, sir, an' let yer know." 



"LOWER AND LOWER STILL." 3<5 

It cost the official some trouble to make the 
lads understand what they really had to answer ; 
and the warder had to put the question to them in 
their own peculiar terms, as to whether their family 
or friends were "flats or sharps" (7. '<?., honest or 
dishonest people) ; and then, as some misunder- 
standing arose, the urchins would cry out, " Please, 
sir, my father an't a sharp, he's a flat, sir — ant 
never been in prisli in his life." Other lads, too, 
would call out that their mother was a cadger (a 
beggar), and want to know what the g'ennelniaii 
would say that there was — a flat or a sharp : while 
others shouted out that they had got a brother 
who was a " gun " (?'. e., thief). 

However, at last the warder had settled the 
matter ; and as he told the numbers off, he shouted 
in his usual official tone — " Five got fathers in 
prison ! One, father at hulks ! Three, mothers in 
prison ! Twenty-six, got brothers in prison ! Four, 
got brothers at hulks ! Two, sisters, in prison ! 
Three, cousins in prison ! Two, cousins at hulks ! 
One, uncle in prison ! One, uncle at hulks ! One, 
aunt in prison ! And now all's told, sir." 

"But one more question," said Uncle Ben, 
sorrowfully, " and I have done. How many of 
the parents of these boys, who have got fathers and 
mothers, are habitual drunkards ?" * 

The question was clearly put and clearly under- 
stood, and the statements duly checked by the 
attendant warders, who, from the repeated return 
of the greater part of the lads to those quarters, 
knew pretty well the family history of most of 
those under their charge : and the answer proved 
to be, that twenty-five boys, at least, in every 
hundred, were rendered even worse than father- 
ess by the brutal sotting of their parents. 

Poor Uncle Ben, in his desire to read his little 

* See Mr, Anfrobns' book. ■ The Prison and the School.' 



t37b YOUNG BENJAMIN FRANKLIN. 

godson a lesson, had given himself a severer 
lecture than he had expected. He was touched to 
the very 'quick of his own kindly nature, and 
stood for a moment with his chin on his bosom 
and his eyes on the ground, as if stricken down 
with shame. Then his lips moved quickly, 
though he uttered not a word ; and he locked the 
knuckles of one hand in the palm of the other, as 
he flung his eyes for an instant upwards. The 
next minute he was looking wildly about him, 
half afraid that some one might have noticed his 
weakness ; and the minute afterwards he was 
rubbing away at his forehead, as if to rouse him- 
self out of the trance that was on him. 

The warders were too busy in restoring order, 
and the prisoners in too much commotion to give 
heed to the old gentleman. No one noticed him 
indeed, not even his little godson; for he, poor 
lad, had turned his face to the door, so that none 
might see and know what he felt. Boy as he 
was, he was well aware how those young thieves 
would only sneer at him for his girlish com- 
passion ; accordingly he clenched his little fists, 
and dug his nails into his flesh, so that his eyes 
might not seem red when he turned round 
again. 

" A'thing more, sir?" asked the chief, when the 
boys had been got back to their seats, and the 
place was quiet again. " A'thing more, sir?" he 
repeated, in a louder and sharper tone, as he saw 
the old gentleman stand still, looking on the 
ground. 

w 'No! no! no! no!" was the half-bewildered 
answer. " I'm going — poor fatherless things — 
home now directly." 

" Like to see our women's prison, sir?" went on 
the warder. 

Uncle Ben s;ave a shudder that seemed to go all 



"LOWER AND LOWER STILL." 377 

through, his body, as he replied, " No ! no ! I've 
had quite enough for one day, thank you I" 

" AVooclen take yer quarter-an-hour, sir, t'run 
through it," went on the officer, who was as 
anxious as a showman that the visitors should see 
all the sights of the place. " See the little things 
in the nuss'ry, then ?" 

Uncle Ben just caught the last words of the 
sentence, and he was all alive again at the bare 
mention of such a place in a jail. "What!'' he 
cried, in utter astonishment ; " did you say you had 
a nursery here, officer?" and he stared at the man 
as narrowly as if he was watching the workings of 
his countenance ; though the gesture was merely 
the instinctive emotion of incredulity on Uncle 
Ben's part. 

The warder bore the scrutiny without as much 
as a wink, and replied, "Yes! nuss'ry was my 
words, sir. Like to see 't, sir ?" 

The old man, now that he was assured of the 
fact, gave vent to no emotion whatever, but 
merely said, quickly, " Of course I should !" and 
then, jerking down his long waistcoat, he set off 
at a quick pace out into the yard, saying, " Come 
along, Ben ! come, boy ! we're going to see the 
prison nursery !" and as he hurried along, even 
an inexperienced eye might have told, by the 
short quick steps he took, and the rapid twitchy 
jerkings of the arms, as he went, that his whole 
frame was in a state of high irritability. 

Again the heavy gates had to be unlocked and 
locked, and more gates forced slowly back, before 
the women's part of the prison was reached. 

There the visitor and his young friend were 
handed over to the care of a matron, with a 
request that they might be shown the nursery 
portion of the bolted and barred establishment. 



378 YOUNG BENJAMIN FRANKLIN. 



CHAPTEE XXI. 

FELONS IN THE CRADLE. 

Once on the female side of the jail, Ben and Lis 
uncle soon began to feel that they were out of 
the close, and stifling atmosphere of mere drill and 
military discipline (of drill and military discipline, 
save the mark, among a brood of children, who 
cried aloud for good fathership rather than drill- 
serjeantship to train and tend them); for tne 
matrons really spoke, and seemed to act towards 
their " erring sisters/' as if they had some sense of 
their own frail tendencies, and some little feeling 
for those poor human reeds who had not had the 
power to stand up against the wind. * 

* There may be readers of a sterner mood, unacquainted 
with prison economy, who may fancy that the transition 
from the mere disciplinarian male jailer to the more humane 
female one, borders somewhat on the sentimental or Eosa 
Matilda school of literature. It may be so ; but the transi- 
tion is not given as a stroke of art, but as a touch of nature. 
In making the prison-tour of the metropolis, and passing 
day after day with the governors of the several penal esta- 
blishments, as the author did but lately, with the view of 
making himself acquainted with the "prison-world," no 
change was so marked, and, indeed, none so refreshing, 
as the transition from the formalities of the male warders 
to the amenities of the female ones. The women's prison 
at Brixton as well as that at Wandsworth, and let me 
add in all justice, that at Tothill Fields too (though the 
punishments at the latter place are inordinately excessive, 
being upwards of fifty per cent, more than the average pro- 
portion of punishments throughout the female prisons of all 
England and Wales), these were certainly not the heartless 
and senseless places that the men's and boy's prisons seemed 
to be (always excepting the stupid tyranny of the silent 
hour (!) at the Brixton institution) ; and they were not so, 



FELONS IN THE CRADLE. 379 

The matron to whose charge or care Uncle Ben 
and his little nephew were handed over, was a 
lady of very bulky proportions ; so bulky, indeed, 
that the chain which she wore as a girdle round 



simply because there was some show of kindly consideration 
and feeling on the part of the lady-officers in charge of the 
prisoners. Indeed, to this day the author has no happier 
memory than that of going the rounds with the compassionate 
little postwoman at the Brixton prison, and seeing what 
happiness she found in delivering her little packets of hap- 
piness to the wretched female convicts there ; or than that of 
hearing the long prison corridors at the Wandsworth House 
of Correction (which is really a "model prison" as to its 
general management), echo with the kisses of the matrons 
as they caressed and hugged one of the pretty little prison 
babies, that was being bandied from one female warder to 
the other. The reader may account for this as he pleases, 
but the author believes the simple explanation is to be found 
in the very constitution of womankind itself. Male power 
always runs into routine, idle forms, and silly ceremonies ; 
but women have so little of the powerful, and so little of the 
drill-master about their nature, while they have, on the 
other hand, so much of the opposite qualities of tenderness 
and gentleness, that feeling and common sense with them 
are sure not to be utterly overlaid and crushed by mere 
right-about-face tomfoolery. All that is wanted at our 
male prisons is a little less drill and a little more heart — a 
mild medium between your Martinet oid-soldierism on the 
one hand, and your Macouochie niaudlinry on the other. 
What the female-jailers may have been in the olden time, 
the author has not been able to discover. Whether they 
were as brutal and as base as the males (who should have 
changed places with the prisoners themselves, lor most of 
them had been thieves in their younger days), it is impossible 
to say; but the writer of this book has sufficient faith in 
womanly tenderness to believe not. There may have been, 
and doubtless was, many a gnarled old harridan among the 
female turnkeys of the "good old times; 5 ' but as human 
nature belongs to no one age, depend upon it, that even a 
century and a half back, the majority of the women-jailers 
had the same women's hearts as now, to temper the rigour of 
prison rule — the same women's weakness and women's pity 
for misery and helplessness ; ay, and let me add, the same 
women's prison babies too. 



obi) YOUNG BENJAMIN FRANKLIN. 

her waist, and to which the heavy bimch of prison- 
keys was attached, sank into a deep crease of fat : 
and it was only by the glitter of an obtruding 
corner of a link, here and there, that one could 
tell she wore any such iron girdle around her 
waist. Her face was as round and pleasant look- 
ing in its lining, its dimpling and puffy cheeks, 
as a hot-cross bun ; and whether the typical traits 
lay in the amplitude of bust, or the roley-poley 
character of the pudding-bags of flesh about the 
neck, or the obvious staylessness and wabbliness 
of her whole figure, it was difficult to tell ; but 
there was an unmistakable look of the " mother of 
a large family " stamped upon her whole ap- 
pearance. Indeed, it was by the name ' mother 5 
— mother, in its bare simplicity, without- any cog- 
nominal affix — that she was spoken of throughout 
the entire prison. 

The gatekeeper asked how much beer he was 
to fake for "Mother" to-day— the chief warder, 
when he met the lady, held out his finger and 
thumb, and threw up his nose, as he exclaimed, 
<; Pinch asnuff, Mother!" The Visiting Justices* 
shook their powdered-wigs and smiled benefi- 
cently, as they passed her in the passages leading 
to the Governor's room, saying the while, " Well, 
Mother ! how do we find ourselves to-day, Mother — 
eh?" The impudent boy-thieves would shout 
out after her in the streets, when they got their 
discharge, and saw her toddling along to or 
from the prison, morning and evening, " I say, 
Moth-airr ! Come an' give us a kiss, old gal ;" 
while the woman who had just left the prison 
nursery, and stood, with her infant on her arms, 
at the entrance to some court in the town, would 
drop the good prison mother a silent curtsy as 
she went by and chucked f he liberated little babe 
under the chin. 



FELOXS IN THE CRADLE. 381 

" Well, sir," said tliis most matronly matron as 
she led Uncle Ben and the boy along the narrow 
and dark passages of the prison, and proceeded to 
answer the question the elder Benjamin had 
just put to her, "if you askes my opinion as a 
mother, sir," she began, throwing all her wonted 
force upon ' mother,' " as I've been this sixteen 
year come next grotter day, as is the fourth of 
August, as my own Jimmy was borned upon, and 
he's as good and upright and downstraight a boy 
as ever could please a poor dear mother's heart, 
though it is his own poor dear mother as says so 
■ — if you askes my opinion in that compacity, sir, 
why I reely must say as I can't see as the women 
in our mothers' ward here is at all different, in no- 
wise, in their motherly feelings for their poor 
dear little ones, from them as is outside." 

The lady paused for a minute, and then added : 
" That there is what I says to everybody, sir — 
they're mothers, sir ;" and here the lady stopped 
again, with the double view of enforcing her fa- 
vourite point, upon the gentleman's attention, as 
well as fetching a little breath after the heavy 
flight of stairs she had just mounted — "they're 
mothers, sir," she repeated, "which speaks wol- 
lums for 'em sir, I says ; for a mother will be a mo- 
ther, you know, sir, all the world over ; leastwise, 
if she ain't a monster in human form, as is what we 
don't allow in here, in nowise, sir. I'm a mother 
myself, sir," said she, proudly, pausing again and 
turning full round to stare at Uncle Ben as she 
said the words ; " the mother of nine, as fine strap- 
ping children as ever you see, sir, as is all straight 
and well made, sir, with never so much as a club- 
foot, nor a hare-lip ; no, nor not even so much as 
a port-wine-stain neither, among one on 'em to 
blemish their dear bodies, which is saying a great 
deal — ain't it now, sir ? So in coorse I knows 



382 YOUNG- BENJAMIN FRANKLIN. 

what a mother's feelings is — which is only common 
humane natur', sir, as I tells my good man — he's 
one of the city watchmen as walks the docks ; may- 
be, he ain't onbeknown to you, sir," she threw, in 
parenthetically as she turned suddenly round once 
more, " and hasn't never slept in his bed by nights, 
like a Christian man, for this twenty year and 
more, I give you my word, sir. I tells him he 
don't know what a mother's feelings is, as in coorse 
he do not ; and them as does know what a mother's 
feelings is, and it's only common humane natur', 
I says again, why, they can't but let alone having 
some bowels of passion for them as is mothers in 
their turn, sir — let their sitywati on be what it 
may, poor things. So long as they're mothers is 
all as I cares about." 

By this time the trio had reached the part of 
the building which was set aside as the prison 
nursery. Uncle Ben was little inclined to be 
talkative himself, for what he had already seen, 
and what he felt he was about to see, had taken 
nearly all the words out of him, and made him 
moody with the grave reflections engendered 
within him. There was, however, little demand 
for speech from any other while "Mother" was 
present; for even the most pertinacious would 
have found it difficult to have insinuated so much 
as a parenthesis into the monologue on her part. ■ 

As the matron dragged back the heavy prison 
door of the "mothers' ward," it disclosed a 
cleanly-looking whitewashed room, about the size 
of an ordinary barn, with barn-like rafters appear- 
ing overhead. A strong smell of babies and 
babies' food pervaded the place, and the entire 
shed resounded with the kissing and prattling of 
the felon mothers, and the gurgling and cooing, 
the crying and laughing of the inrprisoned babes. 
On the hobs of the ample fireplace at the end of 



FELONS IX THE CRADLE. 383 

the ward, were rows of saucepans and pannikins, 
to keep up a constant supply of warm pap ; and 
the rails of the high guard-like fender were hung 
with an array of lilliputian linen — the convict lahy- 
clothes : such as. shirts hardly bigger than sheets 
of note-paper, socks but little larger than thumb- 
stalls, and coloured blue and white frocks of about 
the same size as the squares of chintz in a patch- 
work counterpane. The room .seemed positively 
crowded with cradles too, for they were ranged 
at the foot of the iron-bedsteads in lines, like so 
many tiny boats drawn up on a beach. 

" Them there's our own mothers, sir !" said the 
matron in an exulting tone, as she stood within 
the doorway previous to entering, and pointing to 
the assembly of babes, as if she was proud of the 
exhibition. " There's twenty- three mothers alto- 
gether in now, with flve-and-twenty children — 
two twinses," she whispered in the old man's ear. 
" Poor things ! I never looks at 'em, and thinks 
about 'em, I don't, but what I feels as if I were a- 
going to be took with a "tack of the spagms. You 
see," she continued, talking in an undertone to 
Uncle Ben, " they're a far betterer class of pri- 
soners, the mothers is. than them brazen-faced 
minxes on the t'other side of "the women's side, as 
is enough to crud all a mother's milk of humane 
kindness, sir, that they is, I give you my word. 
Angh !" she burst out, with all a true matron's in- 
dignation, Ci I'd have such humane warmin as 
them there gals of ourn whipped at the cart's 
tail, I would ; I can't abide sitch unwomanly 
things— and yet. do you know, I often drops a 
tear into my beer, sir. when I sits and thinks of 
the little bits of gals we has among 'em, and turns 
my eyes innards to their latter end. 

u But these here poor dears, sir," the corpulent 
lady resumed with a sigh that made the body of 



384 YOUNG BENJAMIN FRANKLIN. 

her dress heave up and down like a carpet in a 
draughty room, " is mothers, sir, as I Sciid afore; 
and that there shows as there ain't no cuss upon 
them, and they ain't the shameless and 'fectionless 
hussies the other gals is, as I can't abide. Ah, 
sir, a mother's heart is a great thing, sir — a fine 
thing, sir," the old body went on, as she grew 
half solemn in her tone ; " it makes a woman of a 
woman, it do, sir — let alone however bad she may 
ha' been afore. For d'reckly she has a bit of her 
own flesh and blood in her arms to cuddle and take 
care on ; and d'reckly she feels the little thing a- 
drawing its life from out of her own buzzum, and 
a-looking up and a-smiling in her face the whiles, 
I tell you she can't but wish (for I've know'd it, 
and gone through it all myself) as she mayn't 
never do nothink in the world as will hinder her 
dear child from always a-looking up to her as it do 
then." 

Then drawing Uncle Ben half aside, she pro- 
ceeded with no little earnestness in her manner 
to say, " And do you mean to tell me, sir, as 
them there poor things, when they has these here 
mothers' thoughts come over 'em — as is only com- 
mon humane natur', I say agin — when they sees 
the little hinnocent kritter -of their own a-kicking 
and a-cooing in their lap, and wishes in their 
'arts as they could make it a hemp er or or a par- 
son, as every mother do, as is a reel mother to her 
babe, sir — do you mean to tell me, I askes you, 
as these here poor things, as is made of the same 
flesh and blood as ourselves is, sir, don't hate 
theirselves, and cuss theirseives, for the shame and 
hard lines they've put upon their _ little one's 
life, in a-b ringing it into the world with a hand- 
cuff, as a body may say, about its little hinnocent 
wrist? Well, 1 can tell you they does, sir — not as 
they says as much to me, but I sees 'em, when 



FELONS IN THE CRADLE. 385 

they leastwise thinks it — with the tears a-rolling 
down their cheeks, like' a boy's marbles does 
sometimes onbeknown to hisself down the hile 
at church-time — and that too as they sits a dab- 
bing their hands, quite unconscionably, over the 
little dear's mouth, so as to make it babble again 
like the bleating of a little lamb, you know ; or 
maybe a-tickling it with their apron-strings in 
the folds of its dear little fat neck, as it lays 
a-sprawling on the bed. You'd think they was a 
playing with the little darling, I dessay, and a 
taking part in the play too, as a mother loves to 
do ; for I know it, sir — /know there ain't nothink 
in all the wide world so beautiful as a baby's 
laugh to a mother's 'art. But these here poor things 
can't hardly a-bear to hear their little hinnocents 
laugh; for it only 'minds them, you see, that 
the babe hasn't no sense of the place it's in, and it's 
like daggers in their 'arts consequently ; 'coz they 
fears that when it grows up to know the start it 
got in life, it'll come to cuss 'em, as they cusses 
theirselves, for the millstone they've been and 
hung about their poor little poppet's neck. This 
here is only common humane natur', I says agin 
and agin. Why there ain't no parson living as 
could put the thoughts into these poor mothers' 
buzzums as them there little babes as can't talk 
can do. They're little hangels, I says, sent from 
heaven to turn their 'arts, sir. I knows it, I do. 
I've got a mother's 'art myself, sir, and I feels it 
often a-bleeding for 'em." 

Uncle Ben was so little prepared for this simple 
burst of earnest kindness, after the stolid callous- 
ness of the male officers, that he stared for a mi- 
nute in mute wonder at the good old dame, and 
then said, as he saw his little nephew looking up 
and smiling in her fat, good-natured face, " Kiss 
her, go and kiss her, Ben, for her motherly love of 

2 c 



386 YOUNG BENJAMIN FRANKLIN. 

these poor creatures ;" and then as the boy flung his 
arms about her neck, he hugged the prison " Mo- 
ther," and the " Mother " hugged the boy, as if 
they'd been parent and child ; while the old uncle 
turned into the corridor and paced rapidly up and 
down the flag-stones, flinging his arms about as 
if he was preaching to the winds. 

The paroxysm past, he returned to the dame's 
side, repeating her words, " Little angels sent 
from heaven to turn their mothers' hearts." Then 
he paused, and looked her full in the face, as he 
asked sharply, " And what will they grow up to 
be, think you, Mother?" 

" Young devils, sir — devils," was the emphatic 
and not particularly mealy-mouthed answer of the 
woman. 

" I guessed so," said Uncle Ben ; "I foresaw as 
much," — then he was silent for another minute, 
and ultimately jerked out, " But why should it be 
so, Mother — why can't such as you prevent it ?" 

" Lor' love you, sir," " Mother" replied, her face 
growing as creasy as an old kid glove, with the 
smiles that played all over it. " Why, how you 
talk ! The world's agin it — every humane being's 
agin it — common humane natur' " (her favourite 
reference) " is agin it. Do you think, I askes you, 
these here poor little babes can ever have the 
same chance of gitting a honnest penny as that 
there boy of yourn, or any decent folk's child, let 
alone gentlefolks. It's one thing to be borned 
with a silver spoon, or even any spoon at all — no 
matter whether it's a hold hiron or a wooding 
one — in the mouth ; and quite another pair of shoes 
to come into the world with a handcuff ready 
locked about your wrist ; for there ain't hardly no 
gitting it off, I can tell you — it grows into the 
flesh like this here wedding-ring has, you see." 

The woman put out her Unger to show that the 



FELOXS IX THE CRADLE, 387 

little gold hoop had become embedded deeply into 
the skin. 

"A boy as has come of a felon mother is sure 
to find it out sooner or later," she went on, " and 
often much sooner than need be ; for people is only 
too quick to fling the 'stificut of his buth in any 
one's face, when it ain't worth paying a shilling 
to git it. And so the boy's the more ready to 
take to felon ways than a honnest person's child ; 
for, fust and foremost, he ain't got no kerackter to 
lose, you see, and coz he ain't got no kerackter, why 
honnest people won't have nothink at all to do 
with him. Then I askes you, sir, as a genelman 
as has seed some little of the world, how can 
sitch a boy ever find out as honnesty's the best 
pollercy, as the saying goes, if so be as he can'fc 
never git no chance of gitting so much as a crust 
of bread honnestly for hisself V 

" But there's another p'int as I should like 
you to see, sir, and that there is this here. 
Though the mother's heart of the woman as bore 
him maybe, and is mostly, dreadful cut up to see 
her poor little hinnocent with the prison swad- 
dling clothes on his little new-born limbs ; and 
this makes her swear and swear over again to the 
little unconscionable kritter hisself as she'll lead 
a new life for his sake, d'reckly she gets her dis- 
charge ; and though she means it all too at the 
time, more honnestly than a honnest woman ever 
can ; yet, sir, d'reckly as our gatekeeper opens the 
door to her, and her baby and she's got her lib- 
bity agin once more, why, back she goes, in coorse, 
to her old kimpanions, with her little one in her 
arms ; (for where elsewhere has she to go to, poor 
dear ?) and then her good resolves is no better than 
fruit blossoms in Feberrary ; and arter that her mo- 
ther's 'art won't hardly dare to open its lips to her- 
self any more about the child. So the poor little- 

2 c 2 



388 YOUNG BENJAMIN FRANKLIN. 

thing is sent out to play with the young thieves and 
wagabones in the gutter, and there the boy lams gut- 
ter moralses and thieves' p'ints of right and wrong, 
in coorse ; and then I leaves you to judge what his 
principles is like to be after a few quarters of that 
there schooling. 'Cording, when he's about five or 
six, maybe, he comes to us, either for ' cadging,' as 
they calls it, or for ' picking up ' coals for his mother 
off the barges 'long shore, or else for stealing bits of 
hold metal to get slices of pudding for hisself, or 
pYaps for breaking winders for the 'musement of a 
whole lot of the young scarrymoudges. And then, 
sir, when he's been and made his fust plunge, and 
got over the fust shudder-like of going headlong 
into this here pool, why then, sir, he's ready for 
I don't know how many more dips agin ; so 'cord- 
ing he keeps on going out and coming in here, like 
the folks at a show dooring fair time, for he finds 
there's always a table ready laid for him here, and 
a well-haired bed always kept made up for him 
too, and that without nothink at all to pay for it, 
which lams him a lesson, sir, as there ain't no 
unlarning as ever I seed in all my time. So in 
coorse he keeps on a-coming backuds and foruds 
to us, six months out and four months in, until at 
last he gets more and more owdacious and devil- 
maycareyfied ; till the 'ulks or the gallus puts a 
final end at length ultimately to his kr'eer. 

"Ah, sir! it sets my mother's 'art a-bleeding," 
concluded the good-natured old dame, " when I 
looks at the hinnocent faces of these little things, 
(as is liked to the kingdom of heaven, you know, 
sir, in the church sarvice) and I knows — far 
betterer than here and there one — what fate's 
wrote clown in the book agin their names : why 
then I sometimes thinks to myself, surelie it 'ud be 
bettermost if the whole litter of kittens was 
drownded outright. If they're to be hanged arter 



FELOXS IN THE CRADLE. 389 

a while, I says, why where's the good of keeping 
on 'em just to breed more kittens like theirselves 
in their turn, sir ; and have more hangman's work 
to do in the final end, sir, after all? These is 
hard words, sir, for a mother to speak, as has got 
a mother's 'art in her buzzum, and a whole coop- 
ful of chicks of her own at home, bless 'em. 
But I can't help it, sir ; it's my mother's 'art as 
puts the words into my mouth, sir — it is." 

" Come ! come, Ben ! come along, boy ! I've 
seen and heard enough, lad, and so have you?" 
cried the uncle, as the dame came to an end, and 
then turning round, he was about to thank the 
good old body, and hurry off; but the matron seized 
him by the arm, as she said, " You're never a-going 
in that there way, surelie : without never so much 
as a shake of the hand, or a chuck under the chin, 
or a ' God bless you ' to my little ones here. I calls 
this here little lot my second famerly, sir ; and I 
can tell you, when some of their times is up, I often 
has a good cry over the parting from some on 'em : 
the same as if they was a tearing my own flesh 
and blood from me." 

As the dame and the two Benjamins walked 
slowly down the long room, between the double 
file of prison cradles, they found some of the little 
felon babes propped up in their beds, amusing 
themselves with the rude playthings that the 
mothers had invented to quiet them. One had a 
rag doll with a couple of stitches in black thread 
for eyes ; another was thumping one of the prison 
tin-platters, and crowing at the sound it made ; 
and another was rattling some pebbles in one of 
the prison pannikins. 

A few of the mothers were walking hurriedly 
up and down the room with their infants in their 
arms, endeavouring to hush them to sleep by pat- 
ting their backs, and hissing the while as a groom 



390 YOUNG BENJAMIN FKANKLIN. 

does to a horse he is rubbing down ; and others were 
seated at the edge of the iron bedstead, jogging 
the little one on their knees to allay the fretfulness 
of teething. 

But not one lullaby song was to be heard in the 
place. 

As the visitors passed along, most of the women 
rose and curtsied in turn, and every face they 
saw was marked more or less by that dogged, 
sullen, and ill-used air which is so distinctive of 
the criminal character, before it is utterly hardened 
and shameless. 

" D'ye mind, sir/' whispered the matron, in 
Uncle Benjamin's ear, as they moved on a few 
paces, and then came to a stand-still, " there ain't 
a smile nowhere ; 'cepting on that there one's face 
— the woman on my right here— and she's got 
six months on it for bigotry, sir ?" 

" For what ?" inquired the old gentleman, in a 
suppressed voice that still had a deep tone of 
astonishment about it. 

The dame put her mouth close to Uncle Ben's 
ear, and whispered. " Marrying two husbands, 
sir — bigotry we calls it here !" 

Even Uncle Benjamin, sad and sick at heart as 
he was, had to blow his nose violently on hearing 
the explanation. 

" Ah ! she's a brazen-faced bit of goods, and I 
can't abide shamelessness, I can't," she ran on 
with a significant toss of the head. " Yonder, you 
see, is a woman with two infants, sitting by 
the bed near the door — don't turn your head 
just yet, please sir, or she'll fancy we're a-talking 
about her," added the kind old matron, speaking 
in the same undertone as one instinctively adopts 
in a sick person's room. "She ain't one of the 
twinses; she's minding another prisoner's child. 
Oh, yes ! they're very good and patient to one 



FELOXS IX THE CRADLE. 391 

another's children, and we most seldom has cases 
of hill-treatment to punish in 'em. She's in for 
'tempted 'fanticide, sir," continued the loquacious 
guide, as she turned her head away from the young 
woman that Uncle Ben was now regarding with 
an air of pretended vacancy and indifference ; " and 
yet there ain't a better mother in the whole ward, 
nor a kinder-hearted kritter breathing neether. 

" That there prisoner, two off from the one with 
the couple of babbies," the matron babbled on, look- 
ing straight away to the opposite side of the ward 
from that which she was directing Uncle Ben's 
attention to, " don't you see, sir ? — the woman with 
the sailer complexion, and that there dreadful cast 
in her eye — so that you can only catch sight of half 
the happle on it, sir — she's a very bad dang'rous 
kerackter, she is : we had to take her child from her. 
Do you know, she treated the poor little dear so 
inhumanely, we really thought as how she'd a' 
been the death on it. But she's a rare 'zeption, she 
is ; and to tell you my mind, I don't b'lieve she's 
all there, sir," the old gossip added, pointing to her 
forehead, w T hich she affected to scratch the minute 
afterwards. " Her husband was a ground-lab'rer, 
sir, and went out for an ollidy about six months 
back, and she never sot eyes on him since. She's 
here for 'legal pawning, sir, and got two year on it." 

At this point a clean flaxen-haired little thing, 
with eyes so intensely blue that the very whites 
had a faint tint of azure in 'em, came toddling 
towards the matron with its plump short arms 
stretched out, and shrieking, u 5lama! Mama !" 

The matron, or " Mother " as she was called, 
stooped down and caught the little human ball in 
her arms, crying, " AVhat, Annie, my little ducks o' 
dimons !" and then raising it up, she fell to kiss- 
ing it, and rubbing her mouth in its soft neck, 
making the same spluttering noise the while as 



392 YOUNG BENJAMIN FRANKLIN. 

tliougli she was washing her own face with a hand- 
ful of soap and water in her palins. "Bless it! 
bless its own little heart ! she's mother's own 
poppet, she is — a little booty as ever was borned, 
and as clean and sweet as a new pink, that she is, 
every bit of her, sir. This is my Annie, sir, as I 
calls her ; my dear little darling Annie," she ran on 
as she tossed the child up and down, crying " ket- 
chy, ketchy," right in front of Uncle Benjamin's 
face — " she's a sad romp, I can tell you. She's two 
year and three months come the — " 

"21st of May, please!" interposed the tidy 
prison mother timidly with a curtsy, for the 
woman had followed her child to the spot. 

" And was borned in this here prison, sir. 
The mother's got six year on it," the old matrom 
added aside as she kept dancing the little one in 
the air till it fairly laughed again, " for shoplift- 
ing, sir ;" and then, putting her lips close to Uncle 
Ben's ear again, she whispered, "Not married." 

The " Mother " now passed up the ward, carrying 
and cuddling little Annie in her arms ; and as she 
journeyed from bed to bed, she put her finger in 
the dimples of the prison babes, and made all kinds 
of tender inquiries ; first, about the teeth of this one, 
and then the legs of that, as well as reminding the- 
women whose terms were about to expire, that their 
time would be up next so-and-so, and she hoped 
as how they'd take care and never bring that 
sweet little hinnocent of theirn into such a place 
again. 

Presently, stopping suddenly short at one of the 
beds, she said, " That there is the most timbersome 
child I ever met with ;" she alluded to a poor 
little white-faced thing who had thick irons down 
its legs, and who was evidently suffering from " soft 
bones." The prison mother was about to lead it 
towards Uncle Ben ; but though the old man held 



FELONS IN THE CRADLE. 393 

out his hand towards it, the little creature hung its 
head, and struggled and screamed to get back to 
the prison cat that lay curled up on the bed it had 
just left. 

" The mother is married to a private in the 
Granadiers, sir," went on the matron ; " and she 
ain't never heerd from him wunst since she was 
took for making away with the work of her 'ployer, 
sir. She's got four year on it, and fifteen month 
more to do, sir. You see the child is nat'ral timber- 
some, sir ; besides, poor thing ! it never sees no 
man's face here but the Guvnor's and the Surjin's ; 
so no wonder it's afeard at the sight of strangers' 
looks. 

" Well, sir," she rattled on, in answer to a 
question from Uncle Ben, as they turned away, 
and, passing out of the ward, proceeded to descend 
the steps that led to the u mothers' airing yard," 
"we don't keep no hinfant babe here to over 
four year, sir, though there were one little thing 
as we wunst had in the prison so long, that when 
its mother's libbity came, it used to call every 
horse it seed in the streets a great big pussy. It 
did, I give you my word, sir." 

Uncle Ben shuddered, as a sense of the brute 
ignorance of the little baby -prisoner came over 
him, and the boy at his side stared up with 
wonder and terror in the old " Mother's " face, for 
he remembered the tales he had read of the " wild 
boys " found in the woods, and how they had grown 
up as senseless as baboons. 

" I won't ast you, sir," said the matron, while 
passing across the yard back to the passages 
-leading to the entrance to the women's prison, 
" now that you've that there sweet boy of yourn 
with you, who's as like what my own dear Jernmy 
were a year or two agone, as ever he can stare — 
only he ain't got my Jemmy's nose 'zackly — to 



394 YOUNG BENJAMIN FRANKLIN. 

come and see our women's ward over on the t'other 
side, for to speak the candid straightforud truth, 
sir, it ain't 'zackly the place a mother, with a 
mother's 'art in her buzzum, would like to take a 
boy of tender year like hizen to. Ah, they're 
shocking brazen-faced, ondecent, foul-mouthed 
termyglnts, that they is, sir — and the little-est on 
'em is as bad as the biggest-est. They'd only be 
grinning in the young gen'elman's hinnocent 
face, sir, and a-making all kinds of grimages at 
you, sir, behind your hinnocent back, as you went 
along ■ and as I'm a mother myself — the mother of 
nine living, sir, and have had as many as a baker's 
dozen on 'em, bless 'em ! in my time — why, in 
coorse, I knows what a mother's dooty is, thank 
God ; and so I won't demean myself to press you 
to stay and see the Jessybells, sir." 

By this time they had reached the heavy and 
big-locked door by which they had entered, and 
as " Mother " put the monster key into the keyhole, 
she paused for a minute before turning it, as she 
said, stooping down to young Ben, " Kiss me, my 
sweet child ! I know he's a dear good boy to his poor 
dear mother as bore him, by the very looks on him. 
Your name's Benjamin, ain't it ? for I heerd your 
dear father here call you by that. Well, I've got 
a Benjamin of my own, I have ; but he's four year 
younger than you, if he's a day ; and I'm sorry 
to say it, my dear, but he's the werry worrit of 
my life, he is ! for he bustis his clothes out — till, 
lor' love you, it's one person's time to look after 
him, and keep him anything like tidy and 'spec- 
table." 

All the time she was delivering this little domes- 
tic episode, she was smoothing young Benjamin's 
hair, or stroking his cheek, or hugging him close 
up to her side. " There, kiss me again, dear child, 
for the last final time," she said, " and always mind 



FELONS IN THE CRADLE. 395 

and be a good boy to your poor dear motlier, what- 
ever you do ; for you don't know what it is to have 
a mother's 'art, I can tell you." 

The catch of the enormous prison lock then 
resounded with a loud capstan-pall-like click 
through the corridors, and the mother was drop- 
ping a curtsy to the old gentleman, and giving her 
last broad grin to the young one, as the couple went 
nodding to her through the doorway — when she 
suddenly espied the gatekeeper running, with a 
pewter pot in his hand, so as to get to the " wo- 
men' s-side entrance " before the door closed again. 
" Oh, there you are with my beer, at last, young 
man ! Come along, Bennet, for goodness gracious 
sake do, there's a good soul ! for heaven knows I'm 
come over quite swoundy-like for the want on it." 

In a few minutes Uncle Ben and his nephew 
were retracing their steps across the "boys' side" 
of the prison ; and as the couple strode along, 
sorrowfully, the godfather said : " Ah, my boy, we 
have only to imagine that years are flying past us 
now instead of minutes, to recognize the little 
baby faces we have just left in the prison nursery, 
in that file of boy-thieves that are exercising 
yonder in the airing yard before us, and circling 
away one after another, like the horses in the 
equestrian booth at a fair." 

As the endless troop of little felons kept 
shuffling on (the heavy prison boots clattering on 
the flagstones, with a very different noise from 
what their bare feet were wont to make on the 
pavement outside the prison gates), the uncle 
told little Ben to notice the figures on the red cloth 
that was fastened round the left arm of the boys ; 
saying, he would see by them the number of times 
they had been in prison before. ' ' Call the numbers 
out, Ben, as the lads go by, and let's hear the 



396 YOUNG BENJAMIN FRANKLIN. 

tale they tell of boys many of whom are not yet 
in their teens, and none out of them." 

Little Benjamin did as he was bidden, and the 
story ran as follows : 

10 (recommittals), 2, 4, 7, 7, 3, 6, 2, 14, 7, 12, 
10, 2, 4.* 

" That's enough, my boy — that will do, in 
heaven's name," exclaimed the uncle ; " and hardly 
half a score years back these children were many 
of them in the prison nursery." 

At this point the discipline-loving chief warder 
approached the couple, saying, " Like to see pris'n 
bur'al groun', sir ?" Uncle Ben shook his head. 
"Very cur'ous — not a tomb-stun, lowed in it — ■ 
only a 'nitial letter to some — others without no- 
think at all to mark whose grave it is — place chuck 
full of bones, sir." 

44 No, no," cried Uncle Ben, half petulantly, as 
if he thought this wretched finish to the story 
might have been spared him. " I want to go." 

"Pris'nus own clothes store, very cur'ous too, 
sir," persisted the showman-warder. "Their own 
clothes is oncommon strange sight — every one 
says so. All things been foomigutted, so there's no 
fear, I 'sure ye, sir." 

" No, no, man, I want to go, I say," was the 
answer; whereupon the warder proceeded to un- 
lock door after door as before, and to conduct 
Uncle Ben and his nephew back to the gate. 

" Who are these boys ?" asked the old uncle ; " a 
fresh batch of prisoners just come in, I suppose ?" 

" No, sir !" was the sharp response ; " they's the 
scharges !" 

Uncle Ben as well as the warder alluded to a 
group of some half-dozen lads who had cast the 

* These figures are no fiction — but were taken down un- 
der similar circumstances. — See " Great World of London/' 
Part Vin., p. 414. 



FELONS IN THE CRADLE. 397 

prison garb, and now stood gathered about the little 
clerk's office beside the gate-room, habited in their 
own rags and tatters, ready to regain, their liberty. 
Half an hour before they had been warmly and 
comfortably clad, but now many of them stood 
shivering in their scanty and rent apparel. 

One was without a jacket, while another had 
his coat pinned up so as to hide the want of a 
waistcoat, and perhaps a shirt. 

Uncle Ben waited to see the story to its end. 

" William Collins!" was called out from within 
the clerk's office, and the warder outside the 
office-door, echoing the name, told the boy who 
answered to it, to step up to the office window. 

Here he was placed in a small passage, immedi- 
ately in front of the casement, within which stood 
one of the prison clerks, against a desk in the office 
on the other side. 

"You ever been here before?" asked the clerk, 
in a tone of authority. 

" No," was the simple answer. 

" B'longs to the Docks," interposed the atten- 
dant warder ; " and a friend's come for him." 

" Ho ! let 'm step here, then,'' rejoined the 
clerk ; and the " friend," who was a boy hardly 
older than the young thief himself, no sooner 
appeared outside the window, than the voice 
within went on, 6s Who a 5 you?" 

" Collins's brother, sir," the boy responded. 

44 Well," the voice continued, " His Majesty's 
justices of the peace 'uv oddered this boy a 
shilling, and they 'opes they'll never see 'in here 
again. So do you ta' care of him." And with this 
admonition, and the money, the couple passed on, 
to wait till the rest were ready to depart. 

" We alwa's sen's letter to paren's or fren's of 
pris'nus, sirs, prevus to 'scharging on em," ex- 
plained the chief warder, who stood aside with 



398 YOUNG BENJAMIN FRANKLIN. 

the two Benjamin Franklins, while they watched 
the proceedings. " We does this so that the bys' 
fren's may be at gate at the time of thur going 
out, so's to take charge on 'em." 

" James Billington !" was next shouted out. 

The minute afterwards a mere urchin made his 
appearance outside the office window, his head 
scarcely reaching above the sill. 

" You've been in for robbing yer mother, eh?" 
began the clerk, who had perceived that there 
were strangers present, and therefore commenced 
laying on the morality, in full force. " What a 
horrible fellow of a son you must be to go and do 
that ! Why must you go plundering her, poor 
woman, of all persons in the world? The next 
boy to you has been flogged, and that'll be your 
case if ever you come here again, I can tell you " 
— and having delivered himself of this lecture, 
he put his head out of the window, and inquired : 
" Anybody for James Billington ?" 

" Nobody for Billington," answered the gate- 
keeper. 

" Where does your mother live ?" demanded the 
clerk. 

" In a cellar in Hold Street, please sir," was the 
reply of the boy, with a smile on his lip ; and 
utterly unaffected, of course, by what had been 
said to him. 

" B'y's been here offen afore," the chief warder 
said aside to Uncle Ben. " He's bad boy 'deed, 
sir!" 

" Henry Norris," was the next lad called for. 

"How long ha' you been here, X orris ?" the 
clerk began with this one. 

" Six weeks," the boy said, doggedly. 

" How offen afore ?" the other went on. 

" Three times here, and twice in jail up in the 
country," was the cool and frank rejoinder. 




l?#^ =2a %<: 



How came you to break sixty panes of glass, eh?" — P. 399. 



FELONS IN THE CRADLE. 399 

"Ha! we're getting it out of you a little," 
added the clerk. " Nobody for Norris, I s'pose ?" 
lie said, again thrusting his head out of the window. 

" No, sir," exclaimed the' gatekeeper. 

" Thomas Wilson," was then called. 

" What time ha' you been here, Wilson?" in- 
terrogated the clerk, as a fresh boy came up to 
the window, but who was so short that the man 
in the office had to thrust his head out, in order to 
see him. 

" Ten days, please sir," answered the brat, in a 
whining tone. 

" And how offen afore ?" demanded the other. 

" Six time, please sir," the boy went on, whining. 

" Now that's Tery pretty for a child of your 
age, ain't it ?" continued the moral man in office. 
' ; How came you to break sixty panes of glass ? — 
for that's what you were charged with, you know 
—eh ?" 

" I did it all along with other boys, please sir, 
— 'eaving stones," the child again whined out. 

" A set of mischeevous young ragamuffins," the 
moralist persisted. " Was the house empty — eh ?" 

u No, please sir, it wer'n't no house, sir ; it 
were a hold factory, please sir ; and there was 
about a hundred panes broke afore we begunned ; 
so us boys was a trying to smash the rest on 'em, 
sir, when I got took." Such was the childish 
explanation of the felonious offence. 

" Anybody for boy of the name of Thomas 
W 7 ilson ?" shouted out the clerk. 

" No, sir ; nobody for Wilson," the gatekeeper 
made answer once more. 

"Well, then," continued the clerk, "that's all 
the 'scharges for to day. So you can let 'em all 
go, Bennett." 

"Come along, Ben, "said the uncle, hurriedly, 
as he heard the last words : "I want to see the 



400 YOUNG BENJAMIN FRANKLIN. 

end of all this. Good day, warder, good day ;" 
and the moment afterwards the officer in charge 
of the gate opened the outer door, and the wretched 
young thieves and vagabonds were once more at 
large in the world. 

Uncle Ben passed with his nephew through 
the prison portal at the same time, and stood 
close against the gate, watching the proceedings 
of the liberated boys. 

The lad whose "brother" had come to take 
charge of him, had two other youths of rather 
questionable appearance, waiting to welcome him 
outside the prison gates. 

The other little creatures looked round about, to 
see if they could spy any friend of theirs loitering 
in the neighbourhood. 

None was to be seen. 

Of all the young creatures discharged from the boys' 
prison that morning, not a father, nor a mother, nor even 
a grown and decent friend was there to receive them.* 

Uncle Ben stood and watched the wretched little 
friendless outcasts turn the corner of the road- 
way, and saw the whole of them go off in a gang, 
in company with the suspicious looking youths 
who had come to welcome the boy whose 
"brother" alone had thought him worth the 
fetching. 

Then turning to his little nephew he cried 
aloud : "If ever you forget this lesson, Ben, 
you've a heart of stone, lad — a heart of stone !" 

* The bare fact. 



401 



CHAPTEE XXII. 

UNCLE BEX AT HOME. 

It has been said that it is impossible to stand up 
under an archway during an April shower, with 
a man of really great mind, without being im- 
pressed that we have been conversing with some 
superior person. 

But — no matter, let it pass. 

Nevertheless, it is certain that we have but to 
enter the ordinary sitting-room (not the " show- 
room,'*' mark!) of any person, great or small, in 
order to read in every little article of furniture or 
knick-knackery, or even in the odds and ends that 
we find scattered about, some slight illustration of 
the pursuits, the habits, the tastes, the affections, 
ay, and even the aspirations of the individual to 
whom the chamber belongs. 

Uncle Ben's " own room " was not a " reception- 
room," but a " retiring-room ;" a small chamber on 
" the two-pair front," that served him at once for 
study and dormitory too. 

On one side of the apartment stood the high 
turn-up bedstead, with its blue and white checked 
curtains drawn closely round it, and bulging out 
from the wall, like the hind part of a peep-show 
caravan. The furniture was of the straight- 
backed, rectangular, and knubbly kind, usually 
seen in curiosity shops now-a-days ; but which, in 
Uncle Benjamin's time, was hardly old fashioned ; 

2 D 



402 YOUNG BENJAMIN FRANKLIN. 

and this consisted simply of a small old oaken table, 
knobbed over with heads of cherubim round the 
sides, with legs as bulky as a brewer y s drayman's, 
and a kind of wooden "catch-cradle" to unite 
them at the base, as well as two or three chairs 
with backs as long, and legs as short, as weasels. 
In one corner, was set a kind of small triangular 
cupboard, with a square of looking-glass in the 
lid, and a basin let into a circular hole beneath ; 
but though this was fitted with a small door below, 
the style of workmanship was so different from 
the rest of the furniture, that had it not been for 
the box of tools in another part of the room, one 
might have wondered what country carpenter had 
wrought it. 

Against the wall, dangled a few book-shelves 
slung on a cord, and these also were obviously of 
home manufacture. Here the very backs of the 
volumes (without reference to the marginal notes, 
with which many of the pages were scribbled 
round) formed a small catalogue of the tastes, 
principles, and habits of thought peculiar to the 
man who had " picked them up cheap " at auctions 
and book-stalls — for many had the lot-mark, or 
second-hand price-label, still partly sticking to 
their covers. Here one shelf was devoted to 
Shakspeare's "Plays and Sonnets," Bacon's "Ko- 
vum Organum," and "Moral Essays;" Newton's 
"Principia," "Optics," and "Observations on the 
Prophecies of Holy Writ;" Milton's "Paradise 
Lost," "Comus," " L'Allegro," and "Penseroso," 
as well as his " Character of the Long Parlia- 
ment;" Butler's " Hudibras," Mandeville's "Fable 
of the Bees, or Private Yices Publick Benefits," 
and "The Port Boyal Logic;" Erasmus' " Praise 
of Folly," Owen Feltham's "Besolves," and a 
translation of Seneca on "Old Age;" "A Brief 



UXCLE BEX AT HOME. 403 

Account of the Controversies between the Xomi- 
nalists and Bealists." John Bunyan's "Pilgrim's 
Progress," and Sir Thomas More's " Utopia, or the 
Happy Bepublic ;" Longiirus " On the Sublime and 
Beautiful," Bishop Butler's "Sermons on Human 
^Nature," Evelyn's " Svlva, or a Discourse on 
Forest Trees,"" as well as Sir Thomas Brown's 
" Beligio-Medici," and "Vulgar Errors." 

On the shelf beneath this again were packed the 
"Life of Martin Luther," and his "Table Talk," 
the " Trial and Martyrdom of John Huss," and the 
works of Wy cliff, with Baxter's " Plea for the 
Quakers ;" the Sermons of Bishop Fuller and Jere- - 
my Taylor, together with the " Holy Living and 
Djung " of the latter, besides Peter Folger's quaint 
poem entitled "A Looking-Glass for the Times," 
Defoe's "Shortest Way with the Dissenters," and 
Dr. Mather's " Essay to do Good," — not forgetting 
- The Whole Duty of Man." 

Then the lower shelf of all was filled with 
Plutarch's " Lives," and Fuller's " Worthies," 
"The History of the Crusades," Josephus' "His- 
tory of the Jews," "The History of England,"' 
and also that of " The Christian Church :" besides 
Baleigh's " Travels Bound the World," and " Some 
account of the present state of Jerusalem." 

Moreover there were a few strmy volumes 
equally characteristic of the occupier of the apart- 
ment ; such as Nicholas Culpepper's "Herbal," 
and a. "Treatise on Apparitions and Ghosts," to- 
gether with a small "Manual of Short -hand," a 
" History of Witchcraft," a copy of the " Test and 
Corporation Acts," a pocket " Latin Dictionary," 
and a well-thumbed " Concordance ;" whilst ar- 
ranged along the top of the drawers beneath, was 
a series of huge volumes labelled "Biblical Com- 
mentaries ;" and secretly stowed away on one of 

2 d 2 



40i YOUNG BENJAMIN FRANKLIN. 

the shelves of the cupboard in the wall, beside the 
fireplace, was a small regiment of octavos in the 
shape of Bayle's ' ' Philosophical Dictionary," and 
the folio edition of Hobbes' " Leviathan," as well 
as his " Analysis of the Human Intellect and 
Affections." 

Again, the few prints about the room were each 
illustrative of the true character of little Ben's god- 
father, and told the observer that Uncle Benjamin 
was something more than a strict Puritan in his 
tastes. For pinned against the wall was Holbein's 
" Dance of .Death," as well as a few of Eembrandt's 
etchings, that he had picked up from his Dutch 
friends in the town : then besides these there was 
a grand steel engraving of Thomas Franklin, his 
elder brother, in his barrister's wig and gown (this 
was dedicated to Squire Palmer of Northampton), 
together with a small water-colour painting of the 
old smithy at Ecton, in Northamptonshire, as it 
appeared after the heavy snow-storm of 1642, with 
" Benjamin Franklin, Pinxit" scribbled in one corner. 
Further, above the mantelpiece, was pinned one of 
the pictorial conceits that were so popular at the 
period, consisting of a full-length portrait of Uncle 
Ben himself, drawn half " in his habit as he lived," 
and half-skeleton, and evidently painted by the 
same hand'^as sketched the family forge; whilst, 
on the other side of this, was a simple curl of 
flaxen hair, framed and glazed, with the signature 
of a letter in a female-hand pasted below it, say- 
ing, merely, 

" Thine till death, Mary." 

The only evidence of the religious temperament 
of the man was the following Bible text, written 
out large, in Uncle Ben's own hand, and pasted up 
between the lock of hair and the deadly-lively 
portrait of Uncle Ben himself : — 



UNCLE BEX AT HOME. 405 



"When thou pray est, thou shalt not be as the 
hypocrites are : for they Jove to pray standing in 
the synagogues, and in the corners of the streets ; 
that they may be seen of men. Verily, I say unto 
you, They have their reward. 

M But thou, when thou pray est, enter into 
thy closet ; and when thou hast shut thy door, 
pray to thy Father which is in secret; and thy 
Father which seeth in secret shall reward thee 
openly: 1 Matt. vi. 5, 6. 



The underscoring of the words "seen of men," 
and " when thou hast shut thy door," was Uncle Ben's 
own. 

On the table, however, stood the old family relic, 
the " joint-stool" — which Uncle Ben had begged 
as an heir-loom of his elder brother Thomas the 
barrister, before leaving JEcton for New England — 
and by means of which the forefathers of the 
Franklin family used to read their bible in secret, 
(at a time when it was "felony " to do so,) with the 
book fastened under the lid, so that the volume 
might be hidden the instant the approach of the 
dreaded " apparitor " was announced by the boy 
stationed at the door. The book was still kept 
conscientiously hidden as before ; for though the 
government apparitor was no longer feared. Uncle 
Ben dreaded the social spy (who will not allow 
us still to worship as we please) catching him, at 
his devotions. Indeed, the honest-natured old 
fellow hated in his heart anything that might even 
seem like the parade of what he knew to be, when 
deeply felt, a purely secret emotion ; for he did 
not scruple to declare, that as love is always mute 
in its profundity, and grief chatters only when 



406 YOUNG BENJAMIN FRANKLIN. 

dumb despair is passing into whining melancholy^ 
so true religious reverence is silent and solemn as 
the woods which are ever congenial to it. 

"Within this joint-stool also was kept the printed 
list, that was regularly sent to Uncle Ben every 
year, of the subscriptions and donations to the 
principal hospital of the town during the past 
twelvemonth. The eye might : have looked up 
and down the grand names and the rich array of 
figures till doomsday, and never have found there 
even so much as a B. F. 21s. ; though, in turning 
over the pages, it might have detected written at 
the end of the long list, in the same clear hand as 
that which had penned the text over the mantel- 
piece, the following quotation : — 

" Therefore when thou doest thine alms, do not sound 
a trumpet before thee, as the hypocrites do in the syna- 
gogues and in the streets ; that they may have glory of 
men. Verily I say unto you, They have their reward. 

"But when thou doest alms, let not thy left hand 
"know what thy right hand doeth" 

These, with the addition of the ever-memorable 
two volumes of manuscript sermons, that he had 
taken down himself from the most celebrated 
preachers of his time — and a dumpy ear-trumpet, 
that was not unlike a cow's crumpled horn, and 
which of late years he had used in church, so as 
not to lose a word of the discourse he wanted to 
transcribe; these, we say, with occasionally one 
flower in a tumbler of water, and a Dutch oven 
for the cooking of " Welsh rarebits " — for which 
the old man frankly confessed an over-weening 
weakness of the flesh — made up our broker's in- 
ventory of Uncle Ben's worldly goods. 

The boy and his uncle sat at either end of the 
small oaken table, with the joint-stool between 
them, sipping their morning's porringer of bread- 



J':".^. .' ' 






: 



KBI 



*~^=T 




i. ' S3 







Uncle Ben sxpl s Jie [ i les ' Life.— P. 406. 



UXCLE BEN AT HOME. 407 

and-milk, in front of the little wood fire that 
crackled away on the hearth ; for the autumn days 
had suddenly set in chilly. 

" Now, Master Ben," began the godfather, ' ; we 
have looked up our text, and are well primed for 
the discourse, so I hope you've got your sitting 
breeches on this morning ; for I fancy we shall 
want some sticking-plaster, lad, to keep you to your 
chair before I have done with you. Yet stay, 
when we've got .the porringers out of the way, 
you shall have my picture there of the old smithy 
at Ecton to copy ; so you can sit and draw, while I 
walk about the room and talk — and that'll take 
the fidgets out of the pair of us." 

It was not long before the breakfast things were 
cleared away, and room made at one corner of the 
table for the sheet of paper, as Well as the painting 
that the boy was to work upon while he listened. 

Then the old man, having cut a pencil for the 
youth, with a knife that had no end of blades and 
a small set of tools besides in its handle, and lent 
him his box of colours for the occasion, said, 
" There, lad, now go to work — sketch the outline 
in lightly first, and then just fill in the little bits 
of colour here — the red glare of the fire inside the 
forge, you see, and the dark, swarthy figure there 
of old Mat Wilcox ; for that was meant for Mat. 
I wonder where he is now, poor fellow. 1 re- 
member well his standing to me for the picture — 
just as you see him there, Ben, with his shirt- 
sleeves rolled up, and his big leathern apron on, 
in the act of hammering away at the glowing bit 
of metal he holds in the pincers. .And after that, 
lad, you can put in the black clouds of smoke 
pouring out of the forge chimney, and the gray 
leaden sky there, as well as the bright-green little 
specks of house-leek that the snow has not quite 
covered over on the roof at one part, you see — and 



408 YOUNG BENJAMIN FRANKLIN. 

the robin, too, perched on the thatch where the 
snow's thawed there by the flue, and with the 
trident marks of his feet all along the roof. Then 
that done, lad, you can pass on to colour in the 
under parts of the boughs here of the old beech- 
tree that grew beside the forge, and the two or 
three little children there peeping in at the door — 
let me see, whose children were they ? Oh, I re- 
member. " Ha — ah !" the old man sighed, " what 
would I give to see the old place again, and have 
all the fresh thoughts of one's youth rush back 
into one's brain ! Ha — ah ! but that can never be 
now. There," he broke off suddenly, as he flung 
the recollections from him, " you needn't take any 
particular pains over it, boy ; for it isn't the sort 
of thing to please my taste now. There's too much 
white and too much bright colour about it to suit 
my eye at present. Still it's a nice thing to look 
upon, Ben, bad as it is — a very nice thing; for 
when I did it I was but, little more than your 
own age, boy, and I can hardly glance at it now 
without feeling young again. However, this'll 
never do," he broke away suddenly again; "for 
we must go to work, the pair of us." 



CHAPTER XXIII. 

A PEEP INTO THE HEART. 



The old man passed his hands behind his skirts, 
and began striding up and down the room, as be 
said, " Well, .lad, we understand something about 
the business and the amusements of life, and we 
now want to find out what are its duties," 

" Oh, yes, uncle," cried the boy, "I know now 



A PEEP ISTO THE HEART. 409 

what you mean — what I saw at the poor-house 
and the jail taught me a great deal." 
. " Not so fast, boy, not so fast ! We'll see what 
is the lesson they ought to teach you by-and-by," 
rejoined the uncle. " All in good time, my little 
philosopher, all in good time. Xow you remem- 
ber I told you, Ben, that to experience a sensual 
pleasure, it is essential that the object should be 
immediately present to us ? The sugar, for instance, 
is on our tongue — the perfume in our nostrils — 
the musical note ringing in the ear, and then we 
feel immediately, without any thought intervening, 
that the sensation is more or less agreeable to us. 
"With an intellectual pleasure, however, the enjoy- 
ment is never derived directly from the sensible 
impression itself; but rather from the peculiar 
nature of the thoughts, or intellectual perceptions 
engendered within the brain. For instance, in 
the pleasure we derive from wit : the sensible im- 
pression which causes the perception of the odd 
association may be neither agreeable nor dis- 
agreeable to us. We may not care about the tone 
in which it is uttered, nor the paper and print on 
which we read it ; but the perception of the ex- 
travagance in the connection of the ideas is no 
sooner forced upon us by such means, than we 
are immediately thrown into convulsions of 
delight. So again with the imagery and sug- 
gestions of poetry, and the contemplation of 
works of high art, as well as the sublimities of na- 
ture ; the mere sensation has nothing to do with 
the intellectual enjoyment — further than being 
the cause of the peculiar condition of mental exer- 
cise, excitement, or satisfaction we are thrown into, 
and from which alone the enjoyment proceeds." 

" Yes ; I think I can make out the difference 
pretty well, uncle," interposed the boy, looking 
up from his drawing for a minute. 



410 YOUNG BENJAMIN FRANKLIN. 

" Very well, Ben," went on the teacher ; " and I 
must now point out to yon another distinction, 
and that is the main distinction, between the in- 
tellectual and the moral pleasures of our nature." 

The boy paused to hear the explanation. 

"In what are called moral pleasures," con- 
tinued the other, " there is always associated a 
perception of some good or evil happening to 
ourselves or others; but with intellectual plea- 
sures no such perception is connected." 

"Keally, uncle, I don't see that" argued the little 
fellow. " Isn't this picture now good to me? and 
wasn't what you saicl to me about books the other 
day just as good to me too, in its way, as what 
old ' Mother ' said about the poor little prison 
babies?" 

" The confusion, my little man," replied Uncle 
Ben, "is merely the confusion of words loosely 
used, rather than any want of distinctness in the 
ideas. We call sweetmeats good, and say that 
such a poem is good ; and we speak of a good joke, 
a good idea, and even a good number, or a good 
deal ; as well as good fortune, and good men. But 
this is only our vague way of talking, and there is 
no necessity to be always ' speaking by the card,' 
as Shakspeare calls it; for this would make our 
conversation savour more of the crabbedness of 
scholastic logic, than the grace of familiar inter- 
course. We need to be precise only where preci- 
sion is needed, in order to prevent mistakes be- 
tween the delicate shades of ideas and feelings. 
In common parlance it is enough to say a thing is 
green, for us to know roughly what is its peculiar 
colour ; but with artists, who are aware that there 
are infinite varieties of this particular colour, we 
require to define if possible the precise hue or 
species of green'; is it light green or 'green ver- 
diter,' or ' terre-verte,' or ' Brunswick green,' or 



A PEEP IXTO THE HEART. 411 

is it a ' green gray/ and so on. Well then, the 
word good, in its strict signification, is anything 
which benefits or promotes the permanent well- 
being of ourselves or others ; and not merely that 
which pleases us for the moment — no matter how 
purely or transcendently, In this sense, friend- 
ship is good, kindness good ; the same as food is 
good, and even medicine itself is good — though 
it may be sensually disagreeable to us." 

" Oh, I see what you mean now !" said the boy, 
'■ good then, I suppose, is what serves to do us 
good, as people say.'"' 

" Eight, lad ! It is what tends to promote our 
worldly welfare ; therefore you will see readily 
enough, that however much a smart joke or fine 
poem may serve to delight us, it cannot logically 
be said to be good; and that simply because it 
does not serve to advance our well-being." 

" Yes, yes, uncle, I understand it now per- 
fectly," exclaimed the young artist. 

" That point being settled then," proceeded the 
old man, w; of course it follows that a moral 
pleasure is the enjoyment we derive from the 
perception of some worldly good, or benefit, 
accruing to ourselves or others. So now let us 
proceed to find out what this worldly good or 
benefit really means, and then we shall understand 
why things may be agreeable, and good too, as 
food and fruit are ; health, as well as kindly counsel 
and charity too." 

" Well, uncle," asked the youth, who was 
anxious after what he had seen, to have the riddle 
unriddled as quickly as possible, " and what does 
worldly good or benefit, as you say, really mean ?" 

44 1 must turn your thoughts back again, Ben, 
before answering that question," was the reply. 
' ; Now what did I tell you was the great boon of 
sensual pleasure ?" he inquired. 



412 YOUNG BENJAMIN FRANKLIN. 

"Oh! I remember, uncle!" the little fellow 
cried, starting from his seat; "you called them 
' a/tar-graces ;' you said they were enjoyments that 
had been superadded — that was the word you 
used — to the operations of the senses themselves ; 
and that there was no real necessity for the addi- 
tion of them ever having been made. I recollect 
well, how you told me that light was quite enough 
for the purpose of seeing, still the beauty of colour 
and form had been added to it ; sound sufficient for 
hearing, still melody had been connected with it, — 
I'm repeating it all as nearly as possible in your 
words, uncle ; — and that though food alone was 
necessary to allay appetite and sustain life, yet it 
had been made delicious to us as well. And all 
these things you said too, uncle, were ' signal evi- 
dences, — I remember the term well — of the good- 
ness and kindness of the Creator to his creatures." 

Uncle Ben took the little fellow and hugged him 
in his arms ; for this was the religion he wanted 
his godson to get fast and deep into his heart, and 
the religion that the old man dearly loved to talk 
about too ; for he knew how it made a temple of 
the whole world, a temple not only of the highest 
beauty, but of the highest and sweetest worship ; 
filling the mind to overflowing with the fine com- 
posite emotion of admiration, love, gratitude, sub- 
limity, and reverence. Again and again he hugged 
the boy, for he now knew that he had not been 
talking to the winds as they sat by the sea-shore 
at night ; and he told the little fellow with his 
kisses, how glad he was to see the fruit-buds burst- 
ing forth at last in the little sapling that he had 
long loved to tend and rear. 

The boy knew the old man's inarticulate lan- 
guage by heart — as well and naturally, as the 
young bird comprehends the chirrup of its parent ; 
and everv fond embrace of Uncle Ben made his t 



A PEEP INTO THE HEART. 4] 3 

nerves quiver, as harp -strings, that are tuned in uni- 
son, are said to vibrate responsively to each other. 

Presently the uncle was pacing the chamber, as 
before, and the boy once more sketching away at 
the table. 

" Well then, my little man, I now want to show 
you," resumed the teacher, " that as our sensual 
and intellectual pleasures are bountiful, and won- 
drously benevolent additions to the mere per- 
ceiving and knowing faculties of the senses and 
the intellect itself; so the moral pleasures, or the 
sense of moral good, is the crowning goodness and 
kindness of all. Why should we have been made 
to feel gratified for anything, Ben ? why ?" 

He paused for a moment or two, and then added, 
" There was no necessity, lad, for such a feeling ; 
the exigencies of continued existence did not re- 
quire it — for flies live on for a term ; they go after 
their food, and eat it, and yet no insect ever had 
an affection for the hand that fed it. Try and 
imagine fondness in a gnat, gratitude in a flea, 
love in a maggot, and you will comprehend that 
there was no vital necessity for the addition of any 
such emotions to man. The human maggot might 
have seen and thought, calculated and reasoned, 
just as acutely as he- does now : he might have 
known as much science ; have learnt as many 
languages ; have been as profound in the subtle- 
ties of logic and metaphysics as he is at present, 
without any heart at all. Nay, he might perhaps 
have been even deeper skilled, and more subtle 
and clearsighted, lacking human emotions than 
possessing them ; for the heart often warps the 
judgment of the brain, as is seen in what is 
termed sentiment ; even as the brain often checks 
the promptings of the heart, as we ourselves, Ben, 
saw in the matter of prison discipline." 

" Well, uncle, and why should we have been 



414 YOUNG BENJAMIN FRANKLIN. 

made to feel grateful for anything ?" asked young 
Ben; and he would have added, "grateful as I 
now feel to you," but, boy as he was, he blushed 
at the idea of making empty professions. 

" Simply, my son, because God, in his goodness, 
has willed it so," returned the pious old man, 
solemnly ; and a quick observer might have noted 
the uplifting of the soul at the same time, in the 
slight elevation of the eye, as he uttered the words, 
" We might have eaten our bread, lad ; yes, and 
have relished the dainty snack of the new loaf 
too, and yet not have felt the grateful and half 
sacred pleasure we do in looking at a corn-field. 
We might have slaked our thirst in the crystal 
spring ; ay, and have enjoj^ed all the deliciously 
pure delight of a draught of cool, clear, and fresh 
water, and yet never have positively loved the 
brook-side, nor have regarded certain wells as holy 
places.' We might have quaffed our mother's milk, 
Ben (that w T ondrous elixir which the kindly provi- 
dence of the great Father has made to gush forth, 
as the one indisputable human birthright, on our 
very entry into the world — a fluid in which the 
subtlest chemistry can detect no germ of bone, 
muscle, or nerve, hair, nail, or blood, and yet 
which holds all the elements of the human body 
in the most perfect solution), we might have 
quaffed this, I say, and we might still have found 
our first delight in the sweet fountain of our 
parent's bosom ; and yet the babe need not have 
been made to turn up its little eyes and smile its 
gratitude, in the face of her who nourishes it, as 
it drinks in the liquid life. Neither was there 
any vital necessity why the very first emotions 
stirring the heart should have been the purest 
and holiest of all worldly feelings ; those of love 
and gratitude, almost to adoration, for the gentle 
and fond creature that nurses us. 



A PEEP INTO THE HEART. 415 

"We might, lad," the old man continued, after 
a pause, " rather have been sent into the world 
mentally mature ; with our brain as fully developed 
as that of a new-born bee, and have been created 
wise and reasoning young imps, had it been so 
willed ; and we might then have asked ourselves, 
as we lay in our cradle, why should we be grateful 
for all this maternal care ? why should we love the 
mother that feeds and fosters us ? Our judg- 
ment, too, might under such conditions have whis- 
pered in our ear, it was no merit on her part to do 
so ; she was madi to love and cherish, and cannot 
choose but obey the impulse within her. And all 
this fine common-sense might have frittered 
human gratitude down to mere brute folly, when 
looked at under the withering scrutiny of cold- 
blooded criticism. Yet, my little man, logically 
foolish as this same gratitude or love may appear, 
it is assuredly morally beautiful : ay, and the high- 
est moral beauty too : and without it we should 
have begun life but as me're parasitical vermin, with 
no sense nor regard for the body which feeds us." 

" Oh, uncle, uncle!" exclaimed the boy, throw- 
ing down his pencil ; ** I never knew there was so 
much goodness in the world." 

" It is a world full of goodness, Ben, as it is a 
world full of beauty, if we will but open our eyes 
to it," responded the teacher, " for it is God's own 
handiwork, ornate with all the wondrous good- 
ness and beauty of the divine nature." 

The old man reflected for a moment, and then 
said, " YVell, you see now, Ben, that we have our 
sense of moral good and moral beauty given to us, 
over and beyond our reason and our sense of in- 
tellectual delight ; even as our capacity of enjoy- 
ing the agreeableness of sensible impressions has 
been superadded to our mere sensations them- 
selves ; and we can only bow our head and lift 



416 YOUNG BENJAMIN FRANKLIN. 

up our soul in thankfulness for the profuse bene- 
volence of the gifts." 

The little fellow covered his face with his 
hands, and cried aloud with all a boy's fervour, 
" Thank you ! thank you both." 

" Now, it is the instinctive gratitude we feel, lad, 
when any good is done to us," the uncle resumed, 
" or, indeed, when any pleasure is given us — as 
well as the instinctive love which springs up 
within us, for the cause of such pleasure or good — 
that makes the whole world, not only a world of 
beauty, but a world of love too. It is the con- 
tinued reverting of the mind to past enjoyment, 
and the gratefulness that the mere memory of a 
pleasurable feeling produces on the soul, that make 
up that sweet and tender affection of our nature, 
which we call regard ; and it is this continued re- 
gard, or the new delight we experience in contem - 
plating the causes of our past delights, which 
makes objects that are beautiful to us become objects 
of love also. Hence, we not only like the flowers, 
the birds, and the sunshine ; the brooks and the 
fields ; the woods, the country lanes, and the sea- 
shore, but we get to love them also. The entire 
world thus comes to be garlanded over with our 
affections, and every nook and corner of the earth 
hung with some bright lamp of our adoration; 
while even the light- threads of the stars them- 
selves serve as golden cords to link our heart 
"with the very firmament. The sweet aroma of 
the rose, for instance, Ben," he went on, " fills the 
nostrils with a luscious perfumed vapour — an 
ethereal incense of honey-dew, that steeps th 
sense in a balm of redolent delight; while the 
delicate tinting of the blossom, that is a pinky 
ball of beauty — together with the wondrous pack- 
ing of its many petals, and the fine smooth texture 
of the rose-leaves, that are soft as foam in the hand 



A PEEP INTO THE HEART. 417 

— as well as the charming symmetry and rounded- 
ness of the composite form, with the exquisitely 
varied undulating lines of the details — besides the 
pretty serrate edges and elegant oval-shape of the 
richly contrasting green leaves below, jutting 
here and there from the reedy flower stem, 
bespurred with many a little spine ; all these 
points of prettiness serve in their turn to charm 
the palate of the eye with the daintiest visual 
luxury : so that the sense is doubly gratified. And 
then, in the very gratefulness of our nature, the 
mind turns instinctively to the cause of the delight, 
and gets to love, and look with thankfulness upon 
the little garden beauty for the pleasure it has given 
us. Nor does the expression of the soul's grati- 
tude last only while the charm is on us ; but, on 
the contrary, so enduring is our thankfulness, that 
even the very idea of the rose afterwards is suffi- 
cient to revive the sense of all its associate 
winsomeness ; and thus we never hear the name of 
the flower, nor think of the graceful, odorous blos- 
som, without having a regard for the object itself — 
without turning the mind back to the enjoyment 
it gave us — and feeling a faint touch of the past 
pleasure thrilling the brain again. As it is with 
the rose, Ben, so is it with every other object of 
natural beauty ; till the world itself becomes a 
galaxy of bright associations and glowing endear- 
ments ; and every tiny bit of prettiness we can 
remember in the hedge-rows, on the hill side, by 
the river's brink, in the caves, on the rocks, upon 
the cliffs, and along the shore — seems to shine 
like a little star in the brain, and to twinkle in the 
dark dome of the memory with all the tender 
glory of the holiest love." 

Young Ben's heart was too deeply touched for 
words ; so, starting from his seat, he ran towards 
his teacher, and flinging his arms about the old 

2 E 



418 YOUXG BENJAMIN FRAXKLIX. 

man's neck, kissed him again and again, as if 
lie was trying to give back a little of the love 
his nncle had bred in him ; and then, as if half 
abashed, he hid his head upon the other's shoulder. 
The godfather knew what it all meant, and loved 
the boy the more for the very speechlessness of 
the emotion that was on him. 

" Come, my lad," at last Uncle Ben said, " we 
have too much to do, and too little time to do it 
in, to waste the moments in fondness ; so go back 
to your seat now, and listen." And then he went 
on again as follows : " But not only do we get to 
love every object of beauty in the world about 
us," said he, "as if it were really a friend and 
benefactor to us — and to hate to see it injured or 
destroyed, as well as to desire and long for the 
renewed possession of it — but we get to love also- 
the varied and different aspects of nature in the 
same manner. We love, for example, the blush- 
ing beauty of the young virgin morn, as she steps 
from out her bed of night, and parts the crimson cur- 
tains of her oriel window, to peep at the waking 
world once more ; and we love the fiery glory of 
the sunset, too, when the great orb of day seems 
to die with all the peaceful grandeur of a martyr 
amidst the In rid flames — or lies like some mighty 
hero welling his blood upon the earth, as he gives 
his last look of glory to the world. We love the 
golden fervour of the noon ; and the silver serenity 
of the night. We love the maniac rage of the 
foaming and howling storm ; and the fine thought- 
ful calm of the forest. We love the bustle of the 
workday world of enterprise, when the city seems 
to roar like the sea, with the chafing tide of 
human passion ; and, on the other hand, we love 
the lull of the sabbath, when the strife of human 
greed ceases for a while, and the earth is qniet as 
when the flocks are folded for the night. We 



A PEEP INTO THE HE APT. 419 

love the pageantry of travel ; and the long pro 
cession of new countries and strange people. 
We also love the cosy rest and welcome looks of 
the old familiar faces at home. We love the 
tenderness and freshness of the new green of the 
earth at spring-time, when the orchards are all 
silvered over with their fleecy clouds of fruit 
blossoms, and the hedges are white as wedding- 
favours, and redolent as new-mown hay, with the 
flowering hawthorn ; even as we love the rich 
ripe glories of the summer, when the air is seen 
to tremble above the ground, with the heat of the 
soil, and the rivers look cool as moonbeams in the 
blaze of day — when the crops undulate like a sea of 
gold upon the land — when the bean-flower and the 
clover make the fields as fragrant as gardens, and 
the birds are all merry as children to find that 
the earth's feast is spread. We love, too, in its 
turn, the mellower beauties of the autumn, when 
the world is gay as a painter's palette with the 
many colours of the woods, the orchards, and the 
plains — when the heads of the reapers are seen 
above each golden pool of corn — when the trees 
in the lanes have blades of wheat dangling from 
their topmost boughs, and the jangling bells of 
the harvest team sound cheerful as a marriage 
chime, as the high-piled load of sheaves goes top- 
pling along the road. We love the broad crystal 
pavement of the sea as it lies smooth as a mirror 
encupped in the vast silver chalice of the horizon, 
and hived in by the grand pellucid cupola of the 
skies ; even as we love the childish petulance of 
the streamlet, with the broken shadow of its rustic 
bridge quivering into long zigzag lines as the tiny 
tide sweeps under it, dimpled over with many an 
eddy, and cranipled as silver tissue into many a 
curved and sparkling line. We love the rained 
castle, with the weeds and brambles growing in 

2 e 2 



420 YOUNG BENJAMIN FRANKLIN. 

the old banqueting hall ; and we love the neat 
cottage with the roses dangling, like balls of floral 
fruit, over the doorway. We love the broad 
expanse of nature as seen from the mountain-top, 
when the earth seems like a little toy-world at 
our feet, and the far-stretching sight gives one a 
faint sense of Omnipresence in the vastness of its 
range ; and we love the little picturesque bits of 
nature, like the gipsy camp with cave-like tent 
pitched in some sequestered lane, and the cal- 
dron swinging over the fire on its trivet of boughs 
— with the olive-faced crone in her tattered red 
cloak, filmed over with the white smoke, crouched 
beside it — and the old gray shock-coated horse 
cropping the grass by the bank-side ; and all 
arched in by the green vault of overhanging 
foliage, through which the sunlight leaks in many 
a big lustrous drop — till the brown pathway 
is dappled as a deer's back with the mixture of 
light and shade. Further, we love the rosy inno- 
cence and toddling helplessness of childhood ; 
even as we love the silver beauty of hale old age. 
Then, again, we love the birds of the wood and 
the grove — the little lark at morning, that we can 
hardly see in the dazzling of the sunbeam, trilling 
forth a very rapture of song as it lies bellied on 
the air with the warm sun shining on its back; 
and the nightingale in the night waking the still- 
ness with her notes, rich and resonant as an organ, 
and pleasant as the midnight music which reminds 
us of the Saviour's birth. So again, too, we love 
the fine old ancestral air there is about the clamour 
of the rooks — the spectral-like whoop of the night 
owl — the chime-like ding-dong of the cuckoo's 
ubiquitous cry, marking the first quarter of 
the year— and the sharp twitter of the black- 
b acked swallows, as they flash to and fro in fine 
to rked flight over the surface of the pool, before 



A PEEP INTO THE HEART. 421 

the thunder-cloud bursts upon the earth. We 
love the young lambs, too, with, their white curly 
backs and baby-like bleat, as they run to the ewe 
and butt their heads against her side, or as they 
capriole for very gladness in the air ; the hand- 
some square forms of the brown cattle, with their 
eyes as meek as slaves, and breath as sweet 
as violets ; the patient old jackass, with his down- 
cast head and black velvety snout, and the fine 
stoic resignation with which he bears the jibes 
and cuffs of the world; and the faithful dog, 
whose tail is another tongue, and who can read 
his master's looks as we do books. Indeed and 
indeed, lad, there is not a source of pleasure in 
the wide range of animate and inanimate nature 
that is not a source of love also." 

"But, uncle," asked the little pupil, " you say 
love comes of gratitude ; are we then grateful 
to what you would call the stocks and stones 
about us, which cant help pleasing us whenever 
we find pleasure in them ?" 

"Yes, Ben," answered the teacher, "we are as 
grateful, in a certain degree, to them as we are to 
the mother who nurses us. Such is the abound- 
ing spirit of thankfulness implanted in the human 
breast, that there is not an object, however minute 
and however senseless, which delights us, that does 
not also inspire us with a sense of gratitude and 
ultimate love for it." 

"Well, do you know I thought, uncle," con- 
tinued the boy, "that we were only grateful to 
persons for favours." 

"Ay, lad! you thought so because the innate 
gratitude of our nature," the other made answer, 
" is then intensified by the consciousness that the 
favour conferred upon us, is in such cases, a volun- 
tary act. We know that the human being might 
have refrained from benefiting or pleasing us, had 



422 YOUNG BENJAMIN FRANKLIN. 

he so willed ; and therefore we feel inordinately 
thankful for the grace he has done us. But, Ben, 
you forget, my boy, that I have shown you that 
all our pleasures, whether sensual, intellectual, 
or moral ones, are really favours after all ; since 
they were in no way necessary for the purpose of 
continued existence, nor yet for the purposes of 
intelligence and reasoning either. And these are 
favours conferred, too, remember, by a Being who 
might have willed otherwise. It would seem, 
therefore, as if it was an intuitive sense of this 
point, that makes even the child and the savage 
love the flowers, and the brook-side, and the 
woods (and, therefore, feel the same instinctive 
gratitude for them) as naturally as the wisest and 
kindliest philosopher." 

" Oh, then, I see I" exclaimed the little fellow, 
thoughtfully, u the love of nature is but the love 
of God, after all." 

" It is, my son,— the love of the beauty and good- 
ness of the Creator — the reverting of the mind to 
the one Great Cause of all our enjoyments ; and the 
natural intuition we have that such enjoyments are 
pure favours or acts of grace to man. And it is 
the consequent expression of our thankfulness for 
the bounty of the gift which inspires, in its turn, 
a devout love of the All-bounteous Giver." 

"I can only say thank you both once more," 
murmured the boy, as he pondered over the high 
and holy thoughts that the old man had excited 
in his soul. 

" But the world within us, Ben, — the world of 
human thought and action, has as many sources of 
love, as even the world of animate and inanimate 
nature itself. We love play, for instance, and we 
love work too if we will but put our heart into 
the work — we love exercise, and we love rest — 
we love humour, and we love reason — we love 



A FEEP INTO THE HEART. 423 

science, and we love poetry — we love the flash of 
wit, and we love the solemnity of meditation — we 
love the ideal world of books, and we luve the 
bright glimpses of that world which we get in 
works of art — we love the romance of adventure, 
and we love the matter-of-fact of history — we 
love the bright coloured imagination of fiction, 
and we love the diamond purity and hardness of 
truth. Further, if we love the sweet infection of 
cheerfulness, we love also the sober gloom and 
pensiveness of melancholy — if we love honour, we 
love humbleness also — if we have an innate love 
of power, weakness can, on the other hand, win 
our love as well, — and if we have a savage liking 
for pomp and splendour, we have at the same time 
an equally natural affection for the unadorned 
elegance of simplicity. Again, we love praise, 
and we love good counsel, even though it have a 
touch of kindly blame about it — we love the 
strict equity of justice, and we love the blessed 
indulgence of mercy — we love the lavish bene- 
volence of charity, and we love too the wise thrift 
of frugality — we love wealth, and yet we can love 
the poor — we luve chastity, and yet we have 
love enough to pity the frail — we love health, and 
we love the afflicted and the sick — we love the 
martyr, and the hero, and the great artist : the 
philanthropist, the just judge, and the wise 
governor. We love our parents and our children, 
our kindred and our playmates, our friends and 
benefactors, our neighbours and our countrymen; 
ay ! and we have hearts large and human enough 
fo love the whole human race as well. And over 
and ab :>ve all we love the source of all love : the 
one great Friend, and Benefactor, and Father, to 
us — Him who gave us the very power to compre- 
hend his wisdcm and his goodness, and the high 
faculty to love and adore Him fur it." 



424 YOUNG BENJAMIN FRANKLIN. 

The uncle sat mute for a while after the com- 
pletion of the paean, and he covered his eyes with 
his hand as he remained rapt in the beauty of his 
own theme. 

" You now see, Ben," at length he resumed, 
"that if the brain of man can compass the entire 
universe, at least the heart has an equally com- 
prehensive power; and that the well-spring of 
man's love is as inexhaustible, as the objects upon 
which it may be shed are infinite." 

" I see it is, uncle," answered the little man, 
thoughtfully, "and most wonderful it seems to 
me that it should be so." 

"Now, lad, of this same love," went on the old 
man, " there are several delicate gradations and 
shades— so delicate, indeed, that they are as diffi- 
cult to fix in words, as it would be to give a name 
to each different hair's breadth of the rainbow 
bands of interblending hues. However, mankind 
has invented a few such terms, and these may 
be said to indicate the more marked tones in what 
may be called the chromatic scale of love and 
affection. Starting, then, from utter indifference, 
which is the zero in the graduated scale, we have 
first the feeling of Respect, which is that faint ad- 
miration and liking that we have for a person who 
offends no natural or moral law — who breaks no 
tie of kindred — who does no one any wrong, re- 
fuses no just demand, is distinguished for no par- 
ticular faculty, and marked by no particular vice. 
Such a person is what the world delights in so 
much, my lad ; - a respectable man ;' an inoffensive 
creature, who, if he does no good, at least does no 
harm ; for a human being, like a poem or a pic- 
ture, or any other work of art which requires 
high powers to make it excellent, is just respectable 
when violating no rule of good taste, propriety, 
or decency. 



A PEEP INTO THE HEART. 425 

" And what comes after respect, uncle ?" inquired 
the youth. 

" Why, Regard, lad," answered the other; "and 
this, as I have before said, is merely that sweet 
and tender affection of our nature, which leads us 
to look, back with ideal delight upon some object 
that has really delighted us. It is simply pleasur- 
able contemplation — the fond disposition we have 
to linger over and revert to any object which has 
interested us. This is the feeling we entertain 
for our neighbours and old schoolfellows ; and 
even for the suffering, the miserable, and the 
afflicted; as well as for the helplessness of age, 
whether it be that of infancy or senility." 

"Well, and after regard, uncle?" said little 
Ben. 

" Comes Esteem, my boy — not as a necessary 
consequence, but in mere orderly succession," 
replied the elder one ; " esteem, which is the 
affection we have for whatever is of service to us 
or others, and is difficult to obtain. It must be 
difficult to obtain, Ben, or we should set no store 
or value upon the object : and it must be of service, 
or we should have no regard or care for it. Hence 
you will see, my lad, that what is called esteem is 
simply a feeling of regard with a sense of value 
attached to it ; and this therefore makes us loth 
to lose what is estimable. This is the affection 
which lies at the bottom of all friendship ; since 
a true friend is one that never hesitates to serve 
us, and whose acquaintance we can never afford 
to lose. For a man to be really estimable there 
must be a certain amount of what is called { icorth ' 
about him ; that is to say, of qualities that are 
more or less valued and prized, in the mental 
and moral appraisement of the world, as being 
more or less serviceable to us, and which are not 
commonlv met with in the ordinarv run of hu- 



426 YOUNG BENJAMIN FRANKLIN. 

inanity. Thus, if we have merely a respect for 
that mental and moral negation — the respectable 
man — we have a positive esteem for the man of 
talent, and even the man of skill ; as well as for 
"the man of honour and the man of generosity. If 
we respect the just judge, we have an esteem for 
the lenient one. If we have a respect for the 
horn poor, we have an esteem for those who are 
the architects of their own fortune." 

46 You've done esteem now, haven't you, uncle ?" 
asked the little fellow, growing pleased with the 
rapid succession ; " and then what have we ?" 
1 "Why, Admiration is the next soft tone in the 
ascending scale of the tender passion," was the 
reply; "and this is simply the intense regard 
which objects of wonder and beauty combined, 
force upon the soul ; so that we are constrained to 
linger over and dwell upon the contemplation of 
the extraordinary charms which have, as it were, 
transfixed us. Admiration is the highest pleasur- 
able contemplation, interblent with the most 
lovely marvelment. Hence, to excite this feeling, 
two essentials must cohere in the object ; the one 
is, that it must be an object of loveliness, and the 
other, that the loveliness must be so inordinate as 
to amaze us ; for without these twin qualities no 
object can be really admirable. It must seem extra- 
ordinarily beautiful, pleasing, or good to us, in 
order to set us marvelling in the midst of our 
enjoyment, at the very rarity or uncommonness 
of the charms ; for it is this delicious marvelment, 
Ben — this lovely wandering, and yet lingering, of 
the thoughts over an object of high beauty //which 
makes up the state of mind that is usually called 
4 rapture ;' and which is, as it were, a delightful 
swooning — the sweet waking trance of the heart 
and intellect. Hence we do not admire the com- 
monplace qualities of mere respectability ; any 



A PEEP IXTO THE HEART. 427 

more than we admire the simply estimable quali- 
ties of talent and worth; but we do admire 
genius, and heroism, and sacrifice, and high per- 
sonal and artistic beauty ; because they are the 
transcendent rarities, the supreme excellences of 
the world about us." 

" Go on, uncle," the boy exclaimed, as the old 
man came to another pause. "What follows 
admiration ?" 

" Love, Ben," the godfather made answer ; " love, 
of which we have said so much, and of which 
there are volumes still to say, if there were but 
time for the saying of it. Love follows admiration, 
not only in regular succession, but generally as a 
natural sequence too ; for admiration is but the 
first transient gleam of love, and love only the 
steady and enduring flame of long-continued and 
permanent admiration. And it is this persistence 
of the emotion which develops the two other 
tender elements that go to make up the one 
composite passion. It develops first a disposition 
not only to guard and protect the object of our 
love against injury ; but also to cherish and benefit 
it in every way we can : and secondly it develops 
a desire to possess it, to remain for ever present 
with it — for ever contemplating and for ever ad- 
miring and enjoying it — for ever guarding it — 
and for ever cherishing, benefiting, and gladden- 
ing it. This is what is termed ' true love, 5 lad ; 
the love of swains, as well as the love of children 
for their parents, and the love of parents for their 
children ; the love of warm friendship, the love of 
high art, and the love of moral excellence ; as 
well as the love of natural beauty and the love of 
God also. Is ext in the scale we have — " 

" What, uncle ?" interjected the boy, determined 
not to be baulked of his question. 

" Honour , lad," proceeded Uncle Ben. " Now 



428 YOUNG BENJAMIN FEANKLIN. 

honour is the admiration that we feel for any- 
superior quality or excellence which develops 
a slight feeling of awe, rather than love on the 
contemplation of it ; so that the emotion wants the 
tenderness of admiring regard to cordialize it, and 
partakes rather of the modesty of wondrous respect. 
We honour our superiors; we honour the great, 
the wise, the powerful, the brave, the noble, the 
illustrious, and even our parents too. Indeed, 
we honour whatsoever impresses us at once with a 
sense of its superiority and our own inferiority. 
Hence there is always a certain submissiveness 
and deference in the outward display of this 
feeling. It is the worldly worship that humility 
offers up to worldly pride and worldly dignity. 
The servant honours the master, the subject the 
sovereign, the world the conqueror ; even as the 
little child honours its father, whilst it rather 
loves the mother that has tended, fostered, and 
fondled it." 

u Well, uncle," said the boy, " what now?" 

" "Why now, Ben, we have but to touch the 
highest note in the scale — the highest within the 
pitch and compass of the human soul ; and thus to 
stand upon the topmost rung of the Jacob's ladder, 
and look down upon the earth, almost from the 
altitude of the heavens themselves." 

"And what is this highest note, uncle," the 
little fellow inquired as he looked up in the old 
man's face, and felt almost the self-same feeling 
stirring his heart. 

" Veneration, Benl veneration!"* said his god- 

* It is worthy of note that the three words ivonder, vene- 
ration, and honour, are probably all etymologically identical, 
being mere dialectic varieties of the same biliteral radical, 
ion, m, or hn ; for that w and v are philologically the same, 
the Saxon witan, to show, and the Latin videve, to see, — the 
Saxon ivin, and Latin vinum, and a host of similar instances, 
are indispntable proof; and that w or v is equivalent to the 



A PEEP INTO THE HEART. 429 

father, ' ' that fine, lofty, and composite emotion 
which is made tip of the profotmdest regard, the 
highest admiration, the purest and yet warmest 
love and the most intense honour : that reverent 
emotion which is usually associated not only with 
so strong a tendency to guard and protect the 
object of it from injury, as to make us hold it abso- 
lutely sacred, and to look upon the desecration of it 
as the highest crime ; but also with so 'fervent a 
desire to be for ever contemplating and admiring 
it, and for ever lingering over its excellences and 
its marvellous greatnesses and graces, as to lead 
the mind to find its highest delight in the hymn- 
ing of its praises, and the heralding of its glories, 
such as occurs in what is commonly called worship. 
Moreover, there is at the same time connected 
with the emotion so deep a feeling of that submis- 
siveness which is the outward expression of honour, 
that an instinctive propensity comes upon the soul 
to humble ourselves before the venerated object, 
and to bow the head and bend the knee in its 



Greek a, the Latin vendere, and Greek uvzoiiai, are sufficient 
to assure us ; even as &pa and hora, co/llos and humerus 
prove that the Greek o> and a> are equal to the Latin ho. 
Wonder comes to us directly from the Saxon wondrian ; 
veneration from the Latin veneror ; and honour (through 
the Latin) from the Greek &i/os, value ; and the funda- 
mental signification is to be found in the Welsh gwyn, i. e., 
what is white, fair ; that which affords happiness, and which 
is well known now to be the root of the Latin Venus (Welsh 
gwener) and venustas. The etymological trine, therefore, 
would appear to have signified originally the emotion be- 
gotten by the perception of beauty ; and to have had the 
idea of the worship which the highest beauty inspires, 
afterwards superadded by the Latins, and so to stand for 
veneration ; and to have been restricted to the mere feeling 
of marvelment by the Saxons, and thus to mean ivonder : 
while the Greeks appear to have limited it to the mere value 
or high esteem in which excellence is alway sheld — as in 
Honour, 



4dO YOUNG BENJAMIN FRANKLIN. 

presence ; and that from a sense of the very over- 
poweringness of the grandeur of it. This sub- 
lime feeling, lad, which is the very ecstasy of the 
human spirit — the most intense — the most elevat- 
ing, and yet the most humbling — the most purify- 
ing — and withal the most impassioned and fervent 
of the many delights of which human nature is 
susceptible, is generally supposed to be given 
only to the Most High. But, though His tran- 
scendent greatness and wondrous excellence exalt 
the mind to the very highest pitch in the com- 
pass of the soul's fervour ; nevertheless supreme 
worldly greatness and excellence may still excite 
the same feeling, though in an infinitely smaller 
degree. True, there is a strong tendency among 
weak and zealot natures to make idols of men and 
images, to bow the head and crook the knee to 
some golden calf, some dressed-up doll, or even to 
the purple and fine linen potentates of the earth. 
But though there is no necessity, lad," said the 
honest and independent old Puritan, "to go down 
on the belly to any man — any more than to a 
trumpery toy — or to slaver over any bit of frail 
humanity like ourselves with ' your mightiness,' 
or ' your excellency,' ' your reverence,' or ' your 
grace ' — anymore than to offer up oar worship to a 
block of ornate wood symbolical of a saint : never- 
theless, to the true magnates of human kind — doing 
the highest good, creating the highest human 
beauty, and displaying the highest genius and 
power of soul — we should be wanting in decency 
and gratitude, if we did not render to them the 
highest earthly homage of which the human heart 
is capable. So that, always remembering that 
even they are men like ourselves, let us have all 
the manliness of men, rather than the sycophantic 
zeal of zealots in our worship ; but still be ready to 
lift the hat with the profoundest respect, and at 



A TEEP DFFO THE HEART. 431 

the same time to love and honour, ay, and to 
revere, the Great Artists, Heroes, and Martyrs, as 
well as the Good Samaritans of the world. And 
now that the rosary of love is complete," con- 
cluded the old man, w ' do you tell the beads, lad." 

ci First," said little Ben, as he placed the finger 
of one hand on the thumb of the other, so as to 
count the emotions off as he enumerated them, 
" there is respect, then comes regard, then esteem, 
then admiration, then love, and then — let me see 
what comes next ? oh, I know now : then honour, 
and lastly veneration. Seven altogether ; the per- 
fect number among the ancients, wasn't it, uncle ?" 

" Yes, boy, the number of the days of the week, 
and the number of the planets," the answer ran. 
" Now that is the ascending scale of love and 
affection, Ben; and there is a similar descending 
scale running through all the phases of hate, 
scorn, contempt, &c, but this I must leave you 
to spell out for yourself." 

THE SELFISH EMOTIONS. 

"Well, uncle, and what are you going to do 
now? I suppose we have done with the moral 
pleasures, haven't we ?" asked the lad, quite inno- 
cently. 

" Done, my little man !" cried the teacher with 
all the emphasis of profound astonishment ; " why, 
we've hardly begun. As yet we have taken only 
a broad general view of the whole class of feelings ; 
we have merely mapped them out, in the same 
manner as from a mountain-top we see a whole 
tract of country. at one sweep of the eye; and we 
must now come down from our height, and exa- 
mine the several parts of the view rapidly in detail. 
There, you needn't be alarmed, lad," added the 
old man, as the little fellow resumed his paint 



432 YOUNG BENJAMIN FRANKLIN. 

brush, and began painting away again, " I shall 
not be very long over the business." 

" I'm not alarmed, uncle," exclaimed the boy. 
" I declare, I could sit and listen to you all the day 
long, alone with you here. Yes, uncle !" he added, 
by way of intimating to the old man that he was 
ready for his teacher to begin. 

" The best way, my little man," proceeded the 
godfather, " to open up the different sources of 
our moral pleasures to you, is to commence by 
telling you, that some of our moral feelings are of 
a selfish and others of an unselfish character ; that 
is to say, we experience some of the emotions when 
any good or evil occurs, or is likely to occur to 
ourselves ; and some of them, on the other hand, 
when such good or evil occurs or is likely to occur 
to others. As, for instance, we are thrown into a 
lively emotion of joy, when any sudden or unex- 
pected piece of good fortune happens to ourselves ; 
even as we have a strong feeling of sympathy or 
pity on witnessing the misery or afflictions of 
others." 

" Oh, I see, some selfish and some unselfish," 
said the youth, half to himself, as he proceeded to 
scribble the words down as a " mem :" on the side 
of his drawing paper. " I wonder why I couldn't 
have found that out by myself now ?" 

" Well, lad, I shall begin with a brief account of 
the selfish emotions," went on the tutor. 

"Oh, don't, uncle, they're beastly things, I 
know," cried the youngster ; " all about greediness, 
and that sort of thing. Do you do the unselfish 
ones first, unky dear, for they're nice and pretty 
enough, I can tell ; and leave the nasty selfish lot 
to the last." 

The old man couldn't help laughing at the boy's 
simplicity ; however, he was not to be moved from 
his purpose, so he proceeded as follows : — - 



A PEEP INTO THE HEART. 433 

" The selfish emotions of our nature may he 
regarded from three different points of view, Ben, 
and hence they admit of being grouped into three 
distinct classes, according as they refer to the 
past, the present, or the future ; that is to say, 
according as the good or evil which is the object 
of them has occurred to us, either at some remote 
period, or but recently, or as it seems likely to 
occur to us at no very distant date." 

<; I see," exclaimed the youth again, as he made an- 
other note on the margin of his sketch, — " past, pre- 
sent, and future. Yes, uncle, and what are the feel- 
ings that you say refer to some past good or evil ?" 

" Why, lad, the very feelings of love and grati- 
tude, and all the rest (with their opposites) that 
we have been but recently considering," was the 
answer. 

i; Oh, ay, so they are, of course! How stupid 
of me not to know that, to be sure!" exclaimed 
young Ben, still talking more to himself than to 
his uncle. " I see, they include all the different 
kinds of love — love of parents, children, friends, 
benefactors, neighbours, schoolfellows, and so on. 
Of course they do ; because the love one has for 
them must be on account of some good that they 
have done a chap some time before. I see ! I see ! 
Yes, uncle, and which are the feelings that arise 
— how did you say it ?" 

" That arise on the contemplation of some 
good or evil that is likely to accrue to us in the 
future," prompted Uncle Ben. " Why, lad, they in- 
clude not only the emotions of hope and despair, 
and the sentiments of confidence and diffidence, 
as well as all the various feelings that arise in the 
bosom, when we calculate the chances of any 
object of our desires or our fears happening or 
not happening to us ; but they include also all 
those desires and fears themselves : and such -de 

2 F 



434 YOUNG BENJAMIN FRANKLIN. 

sires of course may be as numerous and different 
as are the different objects of our love. Now this 
feeling of mental desire, Ben, is the yearning of 
the heart to possess some object which has either 
previously charmed it, or which it fancies is likely 
to do so ; or else it is the heart's craving for some- 
thing which it wants, not for its own sake per- 
haps, but as the means of compassing some de- 
sired end. It is the excitement of this state of 
desire, physical or mental, which is the main- 
spring of all human action, Ben; and which 
stirs men to move their limbs in quest of what 
they want — as the steam stirs that wonderful new 
engine of Savery's to fling its iron arms about. 
The mental desire differs only from the physical 
one in the fact that the precedent uneasiness, 
which is the immediate cause of the action, is in 
the physical state a purely physical result, as in 
the feeling of hunger, and the consequent desire for 
food ; whereas, in the mental desire, the uneasiness 
is purely an uneasy state of the mind, rather than 
of the body. The mind, under such conditions, is 
continually thinking of the object which has 
charmed it, and which is to charm it again ; and 
every other state of mind therefore becomes in- 
tolerable to it. It cannot rest, from the very dis- 
satisfaction that is on it. A longing, a yearning, 
a craving is excited in the soul for the darling 
object — the same as in the stomach when want- 
ing food — and the hmuan being must go seeking 
what it wants. For we never desire, nor crave 
for, but merely wish for, those pleasurable objects 
which there is no probability of our ever pos- 
sessing ; nor do we go in quest of those objects of 
our desires, on the other hand, that there seems 
no likelihood of our ever attaining. When, how- 
ever, it appears probable that they will come to 
our hands without any exertion on our part, why, 



A PEEP INTO THE HEART. 435 

then we sit and wait, look and long, expect and 
hope for them ; witli more or less patience or 
impatience, according as we nave more or less 
philosophy — or according as the result appears to 
grow more or less hopeful, or the contrary." 

" How nice, plain, and clear it all comes, 
doesn't it, uncle!" said the youth. 

" Hope,* lad," the godfather continued, " is one 

* The term hope comes to us directly from the Anglo- 
Saxon verb Hopian (Dutch Iloopen, German Hoffen), the 
affinities of which are not very clear. Webster suggests 
that it may be connected with the Latin Capio ; but it may 
rather be derived from the Anglo-Saxon Hebban, to heave, to 
lift up ; for the Dutch Iloopen is not only to hope, but to heap. 
Hence hope would signify literally that exaltation or lifting 
•up of the soul which comes of increased belief in the proba- 
bility of our gaining some desired end ; and it is conse- 
quently the very opposite from that state of depression or 
dejection of spirit, which ensues when we lose faith in ob- 
taining some wished for object, and which is usually termed 
Despondency. The Welsh term for hope is as fine a word 
as there is in any language : go-baith, which signifies lite- 
rally seeing darkly. It is a pity that this fine old tongue is 
not more studied by philologists, instead of merely Saxon 
— as by Richardson (who has consequently wasted a life, 
and utterly spoilt a grand dictionary by its crude and trite 
etymologies) — and Latin and Greek only by others. The an- 
cient British language, indeed, appears to underlie the whole 
of the European forms of speech ; and Owen Push's dic- 
tionary is really a noble work. There is no more curious and 
startling proof of the antiquity of the old British tongue, than 
the fact that the word Pythagoras, which we have always 
been taught to regard as the name of the earliest Grecian 
philosopher, is a Welsh word signifying simply " explanation 
of the universe." Hence it is plain that what was origin- 
ally merely the title of a system of philosophy, came to 
be mistaken for the name of the philosopher propounding 
it. Nor can we reject this notion by assiuning that the 
Welsh title was derived from the Greek name, and so came 
to have its present signification ; since the elements of the 
Welsh word exist in the Welsh language. Xow it is evi- 
dent that this could not have been the case had the term 
been derived from the name ; since in our word Macada- 
mize, neither Mac nor Adam are to be found in the 

2 f 2 



436 YOUNG BENJAMIN FKANKLIN. 

of the sweetest, the most sustaining and comforting 
feelings of the soul. What bread is to the body, 
hope is to the spirit, — the very staff of life. What 
oil is to the wound, hope is to the bruised heart : 
the anodyne that heals, lulls, and soothes. It is 
the one tiny bright star that is for ever raised a 
little above the earth, and that seems to beckon us 
onward with its light-tipped wand, as it guides us 
along our darksome way. What would the life of 
man be without this blessed feeling of hope, Ben ? 
what but one long, lingering term in the condemned 
cell of the world, if we only knew that we came 
into existence with the sentence of death already 
drawn out and clutched in our baby-fist, and felt 
that there was really no hope of our life being 
spared beyond the allotted span ? 

" But sweet is the hope of the mother, as her 
little baby bud lies nestled in her lap, and she sits 
and spins her aspirations for her little one, into 
the most lustrous threads of life ; weaving her 
wishes into the brightest and prettiest golden web 
of a fate for the child. How fine too the hope 
of ardent, beardless manhood, when the iron mass 
of circumstances encompassing our lives, seems as 
easy to be cut through as water ! how grand the 
hope of old age, for even though the force and 
weight of this same iron mass may have sorely 



English language in an elementary form signifying each a 
component part of the complex idea which is expressed 
by the compound term. In Welsh, however, pytli signifies 
universe, life, and corresponds dialectically with the Greek 
IBios, and the Latin vita; whilst agoras is explanation, 
from agori, to explain, which again is the equivalent of 
the Greek ayopeva, to speak, a term found partly in our 
word all-egory. So that pyth-(umverse)-agoras (explanation) 
exactly makes up the complex idea, and hence the word 
must originally have been of "Welsh extraction. It should 
be added that the writer of this brief encomium on the 
Welsh language is no Welshman. 



A PEEP INTO THE HEART. 437 

bruised the spirit in the long wrestle with it ; still 
the soul drinks in new life, as it scents the morn- 
ing air of the immortal dawn, and sees, in the 
gloaming of the coming day, a long bright crack 
in the dark clouds, that tells of the wondrous 
splendour of the time to come !" 

And as the devout old man said the words, he 
rose, almost unconsciously, from his seat, and stood 
with his head thrown back, looking far away into 
the skies. 

" Every different form of life, lad," went on the 
old boy, " has a different phase of hope connected 
with it. There is the hope of the young knight 
to win his spurs — the knights of those chivalrous 
arts which are for ever battling for beauty ; as there 
is the hope of the young poet and the young artist. 
Then there is the hope of the merchant looking 
for his ship ; the hope of the sailor watching for 
the land ; the hope of the maiden awaiting her 
lover ; the hope of the little child yearning for 
the promised treat ; and the hope of the schoolboy 
as he counts the days on to the holidays ; the hope 
of the farmer, as he gazes up at the moon, and thinks 
of his thirsting crops ; the hope of the prisoner, 
as he sees the jury leave the box to ponder over 
their verdict ; the hope of the gambler who has 
staked his all, while he watches the ball spin 
round and round, and then sees it tremble and 
vacillate about the ventured number upon the 
board ; and the hope of the young mother, as she 
looks into the doctor's eyes while he leans over 
the cradle of her little one, and feels its fluttering 
pulse ; ay, and even the hope of the murderer 
himself, as he sees the sails unfurled, and the 
water begin to move past the hull of the vessel 
that is to bear him far away." 

' ; Oh, isn't it nice! I think I like this even 
better than what you said about love, uncle I" 



£.38 YOUXG BEXJAMIN FEAXKLIX 

exclaimed the little fellow, tickled with the pretti- 
ness of the subject. 

" Nor should we ever go in quest, lacl, of such 
objects as seem to be within our own reach, or 
to be compassable by our own exertions," the 
godfather proceeded, "had we not the same 
hope of success, as when we stand still, and 
watch what the tide, in the great sea of circum- 
stances about us, will throw up on the shore at 
our feet. Xow, it is this hope of success, or 
rather this faith in our own power to gain the 
end we desire, that is the mainspring and sustain- 
ing influence of all our energies while at work ; 
for if there was no abiding belief in our soul that 
we had the ability either to avert or overcome 
the obstacles that lie between us and the fulfil- 
ment of our desires, we should either sit and 
wait, and long for fortune to waft them to us : or 
else we should merely utter a vague and vain 
wish that the object were in our possession, with- 
out having the heart to hope for it, or the energy 
to move either hand or foot in quest of it. Hope, 
faith, and work, are the three great elements of 
all human action, lad ; and in the social world 
they are as high virtues, as even faith, hope, and 
charity are in the spiritual one. We couldn't 
bestir ourselves even to pluck the ripe fruit that 
dangles from the branch, Ben, if we didn't hope 
to succeed in our endeavours to tear it from the 
tree ; or if we hadn't faith that our muscles would 
answer to our will, and that we had power suf- 
ficient to climb the trunk and wrest it from the 
bough. Self-reliance, Ben — that fine manly spirit 
of honest independence which is the true mark 
of eveiy great nature — is the necessary consequence 
of faith in our own powers ; and whatsoever serves 
to foster this, and to overcome the natural doubt, 
diffidence and despondency of our spirit — what- 



A PEEP DsTO THE HEART. 439 

soever tends to stimulate us with hope rather 
than to deaden and cramp our energies with 
despair ; as well as to strengthen its with faith in 
ourselves, rather than to take all the strength out 
of us by doubt of our own abilities — whatsoever 
does this, lad, goes far towards making an honest, 
upright, self-sustained man of us, and to knock 
every atom of the cringing beggar or the filch- 
ing thief out of our constitution. So I say to you, 
lad, have faith in yourself, faith in your own 
faculties, faith in your own nature, faith in your 
own intelligence, faith in the dignity and goodness 
of your own heart : faith without assurance, mind ! 
be full of hope, but lacking the presumption of 
sanguineness ; and then rest assured this worldly 
faith of yours will lead to the same ' good works ' 
as even Christian faith itself." 

"Yes, I will have this faith," cried the boy, 
roused by the fervour of the old man, who had 
spoken with all the ardour of his own independent 
Puritan spirit. " I will have faith that I can be all 
that you tell me, and oh, may my after life — " 

The uncle cut short the aspiration by adding, 
"May it be, lad, a bright instance to the world 
of a deep abiding trust in that fine manly magnani- 
mity that God has planted, more or less, in the 
nature of every one of us." 

The little fellow hung his head, and the words 
kept humming like the boom of a big cathedral 
bell in his brain. Not a word was spoken by 
either for man}^ minutes. The uncle sat gazing at 
the lad of whom he had such high hopes, and 
watching the rain of the prayer sink deep into 
the hot and thirsting soil of his young heart ; for 
he knew and felt he had touched the one fine 
chord of young Ben's nature, and made it ring 
again with a strain that he would never forget 
to his dying day. 



440 YOUNG BENJAMIN FRANKLIN. 

The boy only kept his eye fixed vacantly on 
the table, and sat gnawing the end of the pencil, 
as his lips moved rapidly with the nnuttered words 
of some inarticulate speech. 

" Well, Ben, we must jog along, for we have 
still some distance to travel," at length exclaimed 
the uncle, rousing the lad out of the trance that 
was on him. 

" Yes, uncle !" answered the little fellow, shaking 
himself as if he had really been asleep. 

" Well, lad, it would be idle to run over the 
several objects of our desires," resumed the 
teacher, " since they are but the yearnings, or out- 
stretchings of the different forms of love, of which 
we have already spoken so fully. Suffice it 
to deal only with those objects that we desire, 
not directly for their sake, but indirectly as the 
means (as I said before) of compassing some 
desired end." 

" I don't understand you, uncle," was all the 
little fellow said in return. 

" Why, boy, we desire money, not for money's 
sake," exclaimed the other — "unless, indeed, we 
have a miser's silly greed upon us — but merely 
because it is one of the chief means in the world 
of procuring what we want. So, again, we delight 
in the exercise of our own power, not so much 
because we find a special pleasure in the use of it 
(for that, if carried to excess, is the tyrant's depraved 
delight, and the ambitious fool's fond mania), but 
because our own powers are what we have mainly 
to depend upon for our advancement in life ; and 
because whatsoever serves to give us faith in 
them, confers a high moral delight upon us. Then 
we desire liberty, so as to be free to exercise those 
powers as we will — within, of course, all due 
bounds of propriety and respect ; and whatever 
acts as a shackle on our limbs or a cord upon our 



A PEEP INTO THE HEART. 441 

will, not only galls the flesh, hut chafes and sores 
the very soul itself; it sets the whole nature 
wincing and smarting, till the continued irritation 
of the fetter makes it grow rebellious even to fury, 
and nerves us with an almost giant force and will 
to burst the fretting bondage. Further, we desire 
security — the security of life and property against 
wrong and outrage; for without this, all our 
labour and our care would be useless, since it 
would be idle to desire the possession of auy 
object that we loved ; idle to wish to guard and 
protect it against harm, or even to husband it ; 
idle to stir hand or foot to obtain it ; if, after all 
our pains to gain it, the prize could be wrested 
from us, and our industry be rendered fruitless, 
at the very moment when the fruit was in our 
grasp. Even so, too, we desire to feel secure 
from bodily and mental injury as well as from 
moral wrong. Moreover, we desire ease — not only 
ease of mind, and worldly ease, or a sense of 
comparative freedom from worldly care — -but ease 
in the work which we have to do, in order to make 
our way in life ; and hence we have an inveterate 
hatred of whatever seems to obstruct our progress, 
by increasing the difficulties in our way through 
the world. Thus we find a special moral charm 
even in our own dexterity and expertness ; as well 
as a fine moral satisfaction when, at the end of a 
long life of toil, we have a sense that our own 
industry and thrift have enabled us to amass 
sufficient to procure for us all the little home- 
comforts, we have been accustomed to, for the 
rest of our days ; and that we have no necessity 
to continue labouring when the bones are aching, 
and the force spent with the heavy load of years on 
the back, nor yet to accept the beggar's dole of the 
poor-house. And further still, we desire the love 
and good opinion of our neighbours — not only for 



442 YOUNG BENJAMIN FRANKLIX. 

its own safe, and because it is morally pleasing to 
our natures — but because it is another mode of 
enabling us to make way in the world ; for when 
we look round and see how many advance by 
favour, and how few by special merit of their 
own, we soon get to understand that almost every 
man's lot is due, nearly as much to the exertions 
and interest of the friends he finds and makes in 
life, as it is due to- his own energies, talents, and 
rectitude. Indeed, so much of human life and 
intercourse must depend upon trust, Ben, that 
not to be trustworthy is to sever our own indivi- 
dual link from the great chain, and so to put an 
end to our being dragged on by the rest. The 
love and good opinion of our neighbours, there- 
fore, is desirable, boy — not only because it has 
been made naturally pleasant to us to receive — ■ 
but because it is essential, ere we can be trusted, 
and ere we can receive any favour or help in our 
work from those about us. 

" Now these, Ben, so far as I know," concluded 
the old man, " constitute the principal objects 
that we desire, not directly, for their own sakes, 
but, I repeat, indirectly, as means to an end : 
money, power, liberty, security, ease, and good 
name. But every one of these sources of moral 
pleasure, I should warn you, may be abused, and 
transformed into the ugliest moral vices. We may 
love money, for example, till our very soul is 
jaundiced with the yellow earth, and we grow 
prone to go down on our bellies in worship of each 
golden calf in the land ; we may love it till we 
love to see the very colour of our money plastered 
over our walls and on our chairs, our tables and 
sideboards, our lacqueys, backs, our coach-panels, 
and our own bodies ; till even, like long-eared 
Midas himself, we may find no beauty in the 
wide world but in the precious brazen stuff* 



A PEEP IXTO THE HEART. 443 

Nevertheless, Ben, money is not the ' filthy lucre, 
that your sentimental fools delight to term it ; 
but only filthy, when used for filthy purposes. 
Money itself, lad, is really neither a good nor an 
evil, but simply a means; and therefore capable 
of being made either good or evil as we please ; 
according as we choose to apply it to either a noble 
or a base object. So with power too, we may 
delight in the exercise of it, till we get to feel 
the same proud pleasure in driving and curbing 
men — as a good horseman does in riding a fiery- 
natured steed, and in seeing, while he feels per- 
fectly secure in his seat, the mettlesome bit of 
blood fret and foam at the mouth, from the 
continued chafing of the bit ; and in feeling him 
plunge and rear beneath him, at each fresh thrust 
of the spur or switch of the whip. Or if we have 
a zest for the luxury of tyranny, we may still 
find a morbid pleasure in the sense of mastery, 
from the very adulation and fawning that the 
possession of power begets among the sycophants 
and serfs about us. The hollow, heartless voices 
of the world's toadies are positive music in the 
ambitious man's ear ; for the man of ' high ambition/ 
as it is called, finds little pleasure in the exercise 
of power itself, but the sweetest possible delight 
in the court and obeisance that the world pays 
to the powerful. To Ms mean soul, the noblest 
sight in life is not a man standing erect as his 
Maker made him ; upright in body as in mind, 
and instinct with all the fine, unassuming courage 
of true dignity — but crouching on his knees in 
the born beggar's attitude of abasement and sup- 
plication. Your ' lord paramount ' delights in 
this, because the moral hop-o'-my-thumb feels him- 
self sixpenny-worth of halfpence higher from the 
contrast. 

" So, too, the love of liberty may pass into the love 



444 YOUNG BENJAMIN FRANKLIN. 

of unrestricted licence ; the love of security of 
possession, into the desire for absolute monopoly ; 
the love of ease, into the love of indolence ; and 
even the love of a good name, into the most hateful 
of all vices — that wretched social hypocrisy, where 
people seek to get credit for virtue when they 
are really moral men of straw ; making the moral 
world a world of mere trust — of high characters 
got upon tick, — a world of tick godliness, tick 
kindliness ; where there is no real bullion worth, 
but all flimsy paper- virtue ; where men understand 
merely * the representative value ' of religion, 
philanthropy, honour, and probity, without having 
any of the sterling metal in their coffers ; where 
all is lacker and varnish, French polish and 
veneer, rouge, cosmetic and dyes, artificial flowers 
and wax-fruit, pinchbeck and paste, masquerading 
and costuming, — peacocks' feathers, sheep's cloth- 
ing, and lions' skins. Indeed, Ben, it is the easiest 
possible thing to 'affect heart;' we can do this 
with even a paving-stone in our bosoms ; but we 
can't affect brains, lad, without having some little 
capital of intellect to trade upon. So the social 
hypocrites and Pharisees of our day are always 
overflowing with love and charity, as if it were 
the very milk and honey of their hearts. Ah, Ben, 
Ben ! it only wants a halfpenny-worth of oil in the 
palm to be able to play the Good Samaritan any 
day." 

As the old man sat down to rest for a while, 
young Ben said, " Now you have finished the 
pleasures that refer to the past and the future, 
and are going, I suppose, to do those which refer 
to the present ?" 

" Ay, lad, we have reviewed the retrospective 
and the prospective moral emotions of our nature," 
was the reply, " and so, of course, are ready to 
pass on to what are called the immediate feelings ; 



A PEEP INTO THE HEART. 445 

and they are so called because they arise, not 
from the contemplation of some retrospective or 
}-)rospective good or evil, but simply from the 
sense of some present benefit or injury happening 
immediately to us." 

" Yes, uncle," chimed in the little fellow, " and 
what are the names of some of these ; for, do you 
know, I never can think of one of them before 
you mention them to me. Isn't it strange ?" 

" Why, there are the emotions of Joy, and 
Sorrow, Ben," the uncle continued, " with the con- 
sequent tempers or continuous moods of mind 
that they often leave behind them, and which are 
called Cheerfulness, and Melancholy ; even as there 
is the delight or sense of .Complacency that we 
feel upon success, together with the emotion 
of what is called Exultation, at our triumph over 
the difficulties which beset us ; as well as the 
opposite emotion of Dejection, or sense of Discom- 
fiture, that we experience upon Failure." 

Little Ben wriggled away at the roots of his 
hair with the tip of the pencil in his hand, as 
much as to say, " Xow, why couldn't I" have 
thought of that?" 

" A Veil, my little fellow," went on the Mentor, 
" of the high pleasure of Joy and the intense pain 
of Sorrow, it would be almost idle to speak, 
since they are obviously pleasurable and painful 
states of mind. Suffice it to say, that when these 
intensely vivid feelings are rendered even more 
intensely vivid than usual, by the inordinate 
excitement of some surprise or shock in connec- 
tion with them, they have often been known, not 
only to craze the mind, but even to deprive 
the person of life, then and there. However, the 
emotion, or rather the temper — that is to say, the 
prolonged and gentle excitement — of cheerfulness 
(as well as the opposite state of continuous and 



446 YOUNG BENJAMIN FRANKLIN. 

mild depression called melancholy), is sufficiently 
remarkable to warrant a few words. It is the 
characteristic of many of those peculiarly vivid 
states of mind, which are called emotions or pas- 
sions, that, when the first wild excitement has 
passed away, they leave behind them a permanent 
and kindred state of mind of so subdued a form, 
that it is neither a transient passion nor emotion, 
but merely a prolonged temper or mood. It is as it 
were the trail of light which follows the meteor — 
the faint hum] of the bell after the bewildering 
clang of the stroke has passed away. Thus Wonder 
is the temper or mood of mind that Astonishment 
or Surprise often subsides into ; so Tetchiness or 
Peevishness is the disposition that is prone to 
follow Anger, and general Tenderness the con- 
sequence of Love, or rather it is the mark of a 
loving nature ; even as Cheerfulness is the temper 
begotten by Joy, and Melancholy that which sets 
in after Sorrow. Such tempers, however, I should 
tell you, are often the effects of a peculiar state of 
body or organization, and hence the persons so 
constituted are habitually cheerful, tetchy, or 
tender-hearted, and so on; but in such condi- 
tions the mental moods are the forerunners rather 
than the after-states of the emotions to which they 
belong ; and thus tetchiness becomes a sign of a 
predisposition to anger ; tenderness, to love ; and 
cheerfulness to joy ; even as a melancholy tempera- 
ment (as the bodily state is termed) is a mark of 
proneness to grief." 

" Oh, then, that's what we mean when we say, 
4 Father 's in a bad temper to day,' or he's in a good 
one, as it may happen," cried the little man, 
delighted with the burst of light. "I see now, 
it means merely that he's ready to be pleased, or 
vexed with whatever occurs at home. Of course 
it does. But go on, uncle, please." 



A PEEP INTO THE HEART. 447 

M Xow, my boy," he proceeded, in obedience to 
the request, * I have spoken of these tempers in 
order to point out to you how much of human 
happiness depends upon them, and how necessary 
it is, even for our pleasure, to cultivate the good 
tempers, and to check the bad ones. For as they 
are permanent states of more or less vividness of 
feeling, and our emotions themselves are only the 
temporary flash of human passion, they of course 
are the ugly, rankling festers, and the others only 
the momentary sharp stings ; the one the long 
disease, and the other the instantaneous wound ; 
so that he who wishes to live a happy life must 
train himself to be of a happy and cheerful temper." 

"Yes, uncle, it's all very well to say 'train 
himself to be of a cheerful temper, ' " argued the 
young monkey ; " but if, as you say, cheerfulness 
comes either from joy, or from what you call a 
certain state of the body, how is a person to train 
himself to be continually in a state of joy, I should 
like to know ; or to be in the precise state of body 
wanted for the temper ? I've always heard mother 
say such and such a child is naturally of a good 
temper ; so that I should think our tempers are 
born with us." 

The old man smiled at the boy's argument, for 
he was so staunch an advocate for liberty of con- 
science, that he delighted to hear, and indeed had 
always let the lad speak his thoughts freely to 
him. " True, lad/' he said in answer, " we are 
all born with what the doctors call a certain bodily 
temperament,* and this naturally begets in the 

* Physicians enumerate four distinct kinds of tempera- 
ment. 1. The sanguine (or hopeful). 2. The- choleric (or pas- 
sionate). 3. The melancholy (or sorrowful). 4. The 
phlegmatic (or sluggish). The sanguine temperament is 
generally marked by a ruddy complexion ; the choleric and 
melancholic temperaments, on the other hand, are mostly of 
a darker lme ; whilst the phlegmatic is more or less white 



448 YOUNG BENJAMIN FKANKLIN. 

mind a particular mood or temper corresponding 
with it ; that is to say, a proneness or predisposition 
for particular emotions and fancies. And it is 
also true, lad, that the emotion of joy is not a 
voluntary state of mind, but one that we are sud- 
denly thrown into by certain occurrences in the 
world about us. Nevertheless, we can train our 
mind, Ben, to certain habits of thought ; for we 
can educate it to see the beauties rather than the 
ugly blemishes of things ; we can render it quick 
to detect the goodness, and slow to discover the 
evil in life; we can bring it, by long schooling 
and watching, to find some virtue in the meanest 
thing, and to prefer the contemplation of the one 
little bit of merit to the crowd of vicious defects, 
in even the basest of our fellow-creatures. This 
is what is termed looking at the bright side of 
things ; and depend upon it, Ben, even though the 
new moon appears but a dark ball to us, if we 
could but regard it from a different point of view, 
we should find it still the same brilliant bit of 
chastity, as we see it when the bright side is 
turned towards our eyes. This better view of 
things is what is styled charity, in religion ; it is 
poetry in art, chivalry in the code of honour, 
elegance in matters of taste, and politeness in mere 
manners. Train your mind then, lad, to see only 
the beauties, the nobilities, the virtues, and the 
graces of the world ; and to turn the eye from the 



or pale. The sanguine appears to have a large quantity of 
the red colouring matter of the blood in the system; the 
choleric and melancholic an excess of bile; and the 
phlegmatic an excess of lymph, or water in the system. 
Or, in the language of Liebig's theory of respiration, we 
may say that the iron in the blood of temperament No. 1 is 
highly oxidised, whereas in that of temperaments No. 2 and 
3, it is insufficiently oxidised ; whilst in temperament No. 4 
the blood has but little iron in it to oxidise. 



A PEEP INTO THE HEART. 449 

uglinesses, meannesses, and clumsinesses of human 
nature ; and rest assured, Ben, your life will be 
one continued state of joy and cheerfulness. Close 
your ear too, lad, to that wretched huckster and 
attorney creed, which would have us believe all 
men rogues till we find them honest people ; and 
be you at least gentleman enough, mv little man, 
to regard all men as gentlemen, till you find them 
blackguards. Do this, boy, and you will be sure 
to gather a goodly company of gentlemen and 
friends about you. This is the honest, cheerful 
view of the world, lad, and we have Christ's own 
word for it that the hypocrites are the men of ' sad 
countenances.' " 

"Yes, I remember, uncle,'' the little fellow 
chimed in, "He says so in the Sermon on the 
Mount ; ' Be not, as the hypocrites, of a sad counte- 
nance.' " 

The uncle merely nodded, and said, <; Ay, lad, 
your solemn-faced Pharisee is as different from 
the heavenly bringers of the ' glad-tidings ' of the 
new light, as is the morose old screech-owl from 
the sweet voiced little lark. But, Ben, I spoke to 
you before of the sweet infection of cheerfulness, and 
I now wish to impress upon you, that another 
special reason why we should cultivate a good and 
cheerful temper, is because of the very infectious- 
, ess of happiness itself. Laughter is as catching 
as the measles, lad ; and rely on it. as the sight of 
one person yawning will set the jaws of a whole 
company on the stretch, so one pleasant smiling 
face will breed a hundred other smiles. One 
cheerful countenance in a roomful of lugubrious 
ascetics, is really as genial as a bit of God's own 
sunshine falling upon a sick man's bed ; it is light 
and life too ; and it is impossible to continue 
morbid with that in the room. TVhat a power of 
diffusing happiness then has everv one in his own 

2 G 



450 YOUNG BENJAMIN" FRANKLIN. 

heart, if lie will but train himself to the use of it ! 
Why, if we had the wealth of Croesus, Ben, and 
the charity of the early Christians to boot, no 
alms that we could dispense would shed half so 
much comfort upon those about us, as we have it 
in our power to bestow — if we will but look at 
the brightness of creation, and feel and enjoy this 
brightness in our heart, till it beams again in our 
own face ; and thus make others feel and enjoy it 
in their hearts, and wear it in their faces too. 

" But if we have the power to make so many 
happy at so little cost, by the mere charm of 
cheerfulness," he went on, " think, on the other 
hand, my good lad, what a vast amount of human 
misery we can cause by giving way to bad temper. 
Indeed, there is no home curse like this ; nothing 
that scares the household gods from so many 
hearths ; for there is no tyranny of kings or em- 
perors so hateful or so cruel, and none so cowardly 
either, as that of the home despot • for bad temper 
wreaks its rage only on the helpless; ay, and 
though the ' brief madness ' is supposed to be 
ungovernable, it can — even in the very ' tempest 
and whirlwind,' as Shakspeare calls it, of its 
passion — check the fury that is on it in an instant 
so as to be civil and soft-spoken enough to any 
whose favour it dreads to lose. So, if it be only 
to avoid the terrible devilry of a bad temper I 
say again to you, Ben, cultivate the fine homely 
Christianity of a good one." 

"I shall remember it, you may depend," cried 
the boy, as he again scribbled something down on 
the paper before him, and then said, "That's all 
you're going to say about cheerfulness, I suppose, 
Uncle Ben?" 

"It is, my child," the reply ran, "and now 
only a few words about the pleasures of success, 
and the emotion of Exultation, and then we 



A PEEP INTO THE HEART. 451 

have finished with the selfish emotions of our 
nature." 

11 But don't you remember, uncle, you told me 
a lot about success before ?" the boy reminded his 
godfather. " You said, when you were speaking of 
art, that we found a pleasure in succeeding eyen 
in the smallest things ; such as balancing a straw 
on the nose, or in walking along the cracks in the 
pavement, or indeed, you said, in hitting any 
mark we aim at. I recollect it well." 

"I recollect it too, now, boy," the other 
returned ; ' ; and I think I said at the time that the 
pleasure we felt was always in proportion to the 
difficulties overcome : and that it was simply the 
delight that all people experience in overcoming 
great difficulties, which led some men to practise 
the difficult feats of dancing on the back of horses 
at full gallop, swallowing swords, and drinking 
glasses of wine while balancing themselves on 
their head a-top of a long pole." 

M Oh, yes, so you did, uncle,"* the youth chimed 
in ; " for I remember thinking how true it all was 
when you said so." 

" Well, Ben," the old man added, " this delight 
in overcoming difficulties is simply the emotion 
of Exultation ; and though it may be applied to 
small things, it is, when rightly directed, one of 
the finest emotions of the human soul. I spoke to 
you of the grand peaceful conquests of Art, when I 
was discoursing of the artist power, and the love we 
had for it. But Science has its peaceful conquests 
as well as Art, and they are no whit less grand. 
I never see that wonderful steam-engine at work 
down at our docks, but I think what must have 
been the inventor's feeling when he first beheld 
the iron giant move in obedience to his will ; 
when he found that he had really breathed the 
breath of life into the metallic monster, and given 

2 g 2 



452 YOUNG BENJAMIN FRANKLIN. 

it all the action, and made it instinct with all the 
power of the Titan race of old. Surely there 
must have been a smack of divinity in the emotion 
that then stirred his spirit. Or did he tremble at 
the sight of his own handiwork, as he beheld it 
pulsing like an iron heart, and snorting forth its 
steamy breath, and did he think it as impious as 
Prometheus' daring when he stole the fire from 
heaven? Or did he feel, as a really wise man 
would, that it was God's will and not his, that 
was really stirring the mighty engine after all; 
and that he had merely learnt to spell out another 
passage in the great poem of the fitness of things ? 
I can't say how your old uncle would have felt 
under such circumstances, Ben, though I am afraid 
he would have been weak enough to have burst 
into a hymn of self-glorification, and have indulged 
in a little bit of trumpery self- worship. But I 
hope the fine fellow who made the first steam- 
engine didn't do this. I hope he merely felt the 
supreme delight of conscious power. I hope he 
felt, as he sate down before the mechanic offspring 
of his genius, and watched it puff and gasp, labour 
and heave, as it became quick with the force 
within it, that he had the power of a giant in his 
brain, and that he had used it like a sage ; that he 
could make the mightiest forces in the world as 
docile as turnspit- dogs, at his will ; that he could 
tame even the fire and the flood to do his bidding; 
and that he had learnt how to make arms of brass 
and sinews of iron do the mere brute labour of the 
world for the poor weaiy labourers among mankind. 
I say, I hope he felt merely the fine glory of peace- 
ful triumph — the high honour of his trumpetless 
victory over the elements of nature, and I hope, 
for the sake of humanity, he didn't mentally fall 
to clapping his own hands at his own conceited 
self, or blowing an ideal trumpet into his own ear, 



A PEEP INTO THE HEART. 453 

and proving how small a man he really was, by 
fancying himself a really great one. For this, 
Ben, is the weakness of exultation and not the 
grandeur of it. The exultation of high genius is 
not the exultation of the hero, not the triumph 
of man over man, but the triumph of mind over 
matter. It is the conquest of circumstances that 
stirs the intellectual hero's heart, the mastery of 
difficulties that sends a thrill of glory through his 
nerves ; and as there is no power on the earth so 
great as that of genius, so is there no exultation so 
pure and so noble as that which true genius feels 
when it has done its work, and wants no other 
reward but the mere satisfaction of the work itself 
— the high sense of mastery unalloyed with the 
degradation of slavery." 

THE UNSELFISH ExMOTIONS. 

" What are you going to do now, uncle?" asked 
the little fellow, directly he saw that the old man 
had finished another portion of his theme. 

" Why, now we come to the wftselfish emotions 
of human nature," was the rejoinder. 

" I think you said sympathy or pity was one 
of these — eh, uncle ?" little Ben inquired. 

The old man answered merely, "I did, Ben; 5 ' 
and then fell to pondering what was the best 
way of making out his subject. Presently he 
went on saying : " Some persons, I should tell 
you, lad, have denied the very existence of this 
class of emotions in man. They assert that the 
conduct which appears unselfish is merely the most 
prudent and enlightened of all selfishness. They 
say that we sympathize with, and delight to re- 
lieve the suffering, merely because we derive the 
highest pleasure from the act." 

"Do they though!" exclaimed the boy, who 



45i YOUXG BENJAMIN FRANKLIN. 

was evidently taken aback with the force of the 
argument ; " and isn't it so, uncle? I really don't 
see how it's possible to get over that." 

The godfather laughed at the little man's sim- 
plicity, as he cried, " Why, you little goose, can't 
you see, that though it may be mere seflshness 
that makes us relieve those with whose sufferings 
we sympathize (because in sympathy we suffer 
all the misery of the objects of our pity), never- 
theless, it can't be selfishness that makes us sym- 
pathize with them ? Is it selfishness to suffer 
with them, and to suffer like them ?" 

"No, of course it isn't!" the little fellow said; 
" I teas a goose not to be able to see that, cer- 
tainly !" 

" When we sympathize," the other continued, 
"of course the mere love of promoting our own 
happiness makes us desire to relieve our own 
fellow-sufferings ; and as that can only be done by 
relieving the original sufferings which caused 
them, of course we cannot choose but act as our 
pity dictates. But still it was no love of our own 
happiness, Ben, that engendered in us the feeling 
of commiseration itself; for riddle it out as sceptics 
may, the emotion which causes us to suffer others' 
sufferings — to share in their misery — to take part 
in their afflictions, is, and must be, in the very 
nature of things utterly unselfish; and therefore 
there are such things as unselfish emotions. 
Q. E. D.,"* added Uncle Ben, with a small chuckle, 
as if he^ had vanquished some imaginary as- 
sailant. 

"What's Q. E. B., uncle?" demanded the 
youngster. 

" Q, E. D # , Ben," the old man corrected him; 
u oh, nothing, lad — merely a bit of scholastic 

* Q. E. D. = quod erat demonstrandum: Angl, which 
•was to be proved. 



A PEEP INTO THE KEAET. 455 

pedantry — that's all. Xow, first, Ben, I mnst tell 
yon, that we find certain kinds of pleasure in 
affecting onr fellow-creatures ourselves in a parti- 
cular manner ; and certain other kinds of pleasure 
when they are so affected, but not by ourselves. In 
some cases we find delight in doing them some 
good, or even some evil turn ourselves, and in 
others the emotion springs merely from our con- 
templation of the good or evil which has befallen 
ihem, and in our participation of the consequent 
joys or sorrows. I shall begin with describing 
to you the pleasures that we experience when we 
ourselves confer any good, or inflict any evil upon 
our fellow-creatures. First of all, then, we find a 
curious pleasure even in producing a simple impres- 
sion upbn people — without regard to the impression 
being agreeable or disagreeable. This is what is 
termed the delight of causing a ' sensation,' of 
producing an 'impression,' or creating a 'noise in 
the world.' True, most people prefer to make a 
favourable or agreeable impression ; still, it is an 
acknowledged fact, that there are certain morbid 
natures that even destroy themselves in some wild 
and extravagant manner, merely with the view of 
drawing public attention to them ; others, again, 
indulge in some strange eccentricity of dress, or 
manner; and others live strange lives, or in strange y 
places, merely to make themselves ' outre ' as the 
saying goes, or, in plain English, to render them- 
selves remarkable ; whilst some prefer even the 
notoriety of the felon's dock, and the unenviable 
conspicuousness of a death upon the gallows, rather 
than suffer the utter insignificance of public dis- 
regard. Even as there are other morbid natures 
that feel delight, not in producing a mere impres- 
sion upon others, but in having this mere impres- 
sion made upon themselves : such as the collectors 
of those morbid curiosities which are usually made 



456 YOUNG BENJAMIN FRANKLIN. 

up of hangmen's ropes, murderers' clothes and 
knives, or of some horrible 'identical axe,' and 
the like ; though perhaps one great incentive to 
the formation of such ghastly mu s eums consists 
as much in the desire to produce a mere impres- 
sion upon others, as to have such an impression 
produced upon themselves." 

44 1 never knew that people had such feelings be- 
fore," remarked the boy. 

" Then, Ben, there is the pleasure we feel in 
communicating our own feelings to others" continued 
the teacher. "I have before spoken to you of the 
unselfish character of intellectual delight, and 
pointed out to you how, when we are charmed with 
the beauty of some new truth, or fine figure of 
speech, or the wit of some startlingly good joke, 
we positively long for another bosom to share the 
pleasure with us ; and now I should tell you, that 
it is nearly the same instinctive propensity that 
makes certain people spend large sums of money 
in printing — without any regard to profit — the 
works of some favourite author ; and others devote 
months, and even years, to writing certain books 
from which they can never hope to receive the 
least emolument. But there is no more marked 
instance of the general desire among mankind te 
communicate their own feelings to others, than is 
to be found among zealots, who are mostly so 
eager and rabid to make all the world think and 
feel as they do, that they are ready even to put 
to torture those who refuse to be of their way 
of thinking. The desire to convert and prosely- 
tize — indeed the propensity for tract-printing, 
for gospel-propagating, and mission-instituting, 
springs merely from the innate wish of the more 
earnest portion of mankind that the entire human 
race should feel the blessed delight, as well as 
share the grace of that creed, which they them- 



A PEEP INTO THE HEART. 457 

selves feel to "be the greatest blessing and grace 
ever vouchsafed to Man. 

" Again, it is this disposition to make others feel 
the same joy that we feel, which gives rise to the 
custom there is among nobles and squires to feast 
the villagers and peasants upon the occasion of 
their marriage, or the birth of an heir, or the 
coming of age of their eldest son, and so forth. 
Further, it is the same desire to rejoice in common, 
that is the cause of public jubilees in celebration 
of some great national good : and the same prin- 
ciple holds good even down to the harvest-homes, 
and Christmas-festivals, and May-day games of the 
people." 

" Isn't it curious !" murmured the youth. 

" Next, lad, there is an instinctive propensity 
in our nature," Uncle Ben proceeded, " not only 
to share our own happiness with our fellows, but 
also to share our advantages with them, at the 
expense of our own gains ; in other words, there 
is a natural desire to benefit others. There can be 
no doubt that we would rather have the whole 
world happy than miserable, Ben — provided it cost 
us nothing to make it so, and the mind be in a 
sane condition. Assuredly, in a natural state of 
things, every one in his heart wishes every one 
well, and it is only the petty greeds, rivalries, 
jealousies, and heartburnings of our nature, that 
interfere with the operation of this aspiration, 
which is merely the utterance of the native 
benevolence of our souls. If we admit that there 
is an innate tendency to feast those about us, when 
we ourselves experience any unexpected or unusual 
happiness ; or, in other words, to make those about 
us rejoice, merely because we ourselves are full of 
joy : surely we must allow that the innate pro- 
pensity of the human heart is not alone to compass 
our own happiness, but also to share that happi- 



458 YOUNG BENJAMIN FRANKLIN. 

n ess with others — more particularly if we can do 
so without any sacrifice being required on our part. 
Moreover, misery, squalor, and bodily suffering 
are such naturally ugly things to us, that even our 
instinctive love of the beautiful and the agreeable 
is sufficient to make us prefer universal well-being 
to universal pain and gnashing of teeth. So that 
it is manifest that the benevolent principle — 
when uncontrolled by any petty private interest, 
or any savage revengeful passion — is a marked 
attribute of our nature, and lies at the very bottom 
of the human heart. But if we are naturally 
benevolent to those who have never wronged or 
injured us (as .we are and can be malevolent to 
those who have), surely we can advance a step 
farther, and say we have an instinctive propensity 
to benefit those fellow-creatures who are neither 
friends nor foes to us. I do not mean," proceeded 
the old man, "that we have an innate desire to 
relieve suffering, for that proceeds, as we have 
seen, from our instinctive disposition to com- 
miserate — or, in other words, to share the misery 
of others ; but I do mean, that we are disposed to 
benefit and promote the good of our fellow-beings, 
merely for the sake of benefiting them, and because 
we find a greater pleasure in the contemplation of 
human happiness than in witnessing human misery. 
Of course this desire to benefit is continually 
restrained by a number of conflicting emotions," 
— the uncle added, " and more particularly by our 
desire to promote our own happiness, as well as 
by our natural disposition to guard and husband 
our own possessions, and to treasure up what we 
love and esteem. But, that there is such a benevo- 
lent and benefactive impulse in human nature, 
is demonstrable from the very moral beauty of 
goodness, and the moral ugliness of evil ; for that 
which is morally beautiful to us we cannot but 



A PEEP INTO THE HEART. 459 

prefer to see prevail, rather than that which is 
morally ugly — even as we instinctively prefer 
sunshine to darkness, and harmony to discord. 
Indeed, if there were no innate disposition to 
benefit, there could never have been a pure 
benefit rendered in the world, — that is to say, a 
good act done to a fellow-creature for the mere 
sake of the goodness ; for in that case it would 
either be a voluntary act done without any cause 
to determine the volition; or else the act itself 
must be referred to some purely selfish motive, 
which is absurd — since, to promote the good of 
another, at the sacrifice of our own personal 
good, is to be unselfish ; and if, on the other hand, 
it be urged that we do so because the good of 
others delights us, or in other words, that it is 
merely selfishness on our part, after all, that causes 
us to confer the good on them — then the answer 
is, How, if we are purely selfish, can the good of 
others delight us ; since to find delight in good 
that is not our own good, is to love goodness for 
its own sake, and hence it is to have a pure 
unselfish love of it ?" 

This was said with all the air of an old contro- 
versial divine ; indeed, in his youth, Uncle Ben 
had delighted in disputation, and still nothing 
pleased him more than to break a friendly lance 
with any one on the pet subjects of his heart ; and 
often he and his brother Josiah would sit by their 
hearth, and play a game of logical chess, as it were, 
while they discussed some of the old subtleties of 
the schoolmen : as to whether the angels could pass 
from one point of space to another without going 
through the intermediate places, and whether 
space itself was an entity or a quiddity, as well as 
trying to unravel the nice knotty tangle of 
" Liberty and Necessity ;" when Josiah would 
stand out hard for "Predestination," while the 



460 YOUNG BENJAMIN FRANKLIN. 

more liberal brother would take up the cudgels 
in favour of free agency, and try to split the 
fine metaphysical hair, as to whether foreknow- 
ledge necessarily implied fore ordinance. 

" I can hardly follow all you say, uncle," 
observed little Ben, as he chewed the cud of the 
old man's syllogism ; " but it seems to me that we 
must love goodness for goodness' sake, as you call 
it ; just as ^we love truth for truth's sake, and 
beauty for beauty's sake." 

" Of course we do, lad," cried the other ; " and if 
we have a pure unselfish love of goodness and 
truth, then, I say again, we have a pure love of 
promoting the good of others ; or what is quite the 
same thing, an utterly disinterested desire to bene- 
fit them. However, perhaps the most convincing 
proof of the existence of this innate benevolence 
of our nature is to be found in the fact which 
nobody doubts, and none have ever attempted to 
gainsay : viz., that there is an instinctive spirit of 
malevolence in the human heart; and that we 
desire to injure, and love to inflict evil upon those 
whom we believe to have wronged us, or even 
interfered with the attainment of our wishes." 

" Oh, uncle, don't tell me, after all the fine things 
you've been saying about human nature, that we 
have such feelings at all," little Ben exclaimed, 
for he had begun to look upon the heart of man with 
the same fond eyes as a mother gazes at the babe 
in her lap, and he couldn't bear to think it had 
got even one little blemish about it. 

" Don't tell you !" shouted Uncle Benjamin ; " of 
course I will tell you, boy. Do you think I wish to 
build up a barley-sugar palace of a world for you ? 
Do you think 1 wish to fasten a pair of goose- 
wings on your back, youngster, and lead you to 
believe that you — little devil as you can be — are 
a perfect angel? No, lad!" and he thumped the 



A PEEP INTO THE HEART. 461 

table as lie said the words ; " you are not an angel, 
only an angel in the bud ; a creeping, crawling, 
human grub, that may one day be a winged butter- 
fly. The human heart, Ben, is picked out all black 
and white, like a chess-board, with the strong con- 
trast of opposing passions — passions for good, and 
passions for evil as well ; and / say again, the very 
fact of there being a malevolent principle in our 
soul, is proof conclusive of there being a benevolent 
one also to counterbalance it. Hence, lad, the next 
moral pleasure we have to deal with is the pleasure 
ice find in injuring others. Some believe that there 
are people of an innately cruel nature, who de- 
light in torturing ; for the mere sake of the pleasure 
they derive from the contemplation of the torments ; 
that is to say, in torturing those who have never 
offended them — not because the torturers have any 
savage desire for revenge upon their soul — but 
simply because the evil, the pain, and the anguish 
are agreeable to their nature. Now /don't believe 
that such ' depraved ' nature, as this is termed, is 
possible in the very nature of things. It is im- 
possible that ugliness can be beautiful, Ben ; some, 
indeed, may think that beautiful which we hold to 
be ugly; still it is not ugliness to them, but 
beauty instead. So, lad, pain, even in another, 
never can be pleasure to us ; for it is part of God's 
ordination that the sight of pain in any feeling 
thing— directly it impresses us with a sense of the 
pain — should give rise to a feeling of sympathy or 
pity in the beholder ; and this has been rendered so 
naturally painful and distressing to us, as to induce 
us to seek to put an end to the sufferings which 
originally excited it." 

4; Well, but, uncle, I remember some boys at old 
Brown well's school," urged young Ben, "who 
always seemed to me to be naturally cruel, and 
used to ill treat — oh, so dreadfully, you don't know ! 



462 YOUNG BENJAMIN FRANKLIN. 

— the poor dumb animals that mother always 
taught us to be kind to." 

" Yes, lad, I know," the uncle continued, " boys 
will tear off flies' legs and wings, tie kettles to 
dogs' tails, put cats' feet in walnut shells, and 
commit a host of other atrocities ; even as grown 
people will go to executions, and find delight 
in gazing at some poor wretch in his death- 
struggles." 

" Then, isn't that a proof that some persons do 
find pleasure in other people's pain?" modestly 
inquired the little fellow. 

" No, lad !" cried the uncle ; " it is not and cannot 
possibly be a proof of what, in the very nature of 
things, I repeat, is a moral impossibility ; for I say 
again, the contemplation of pain in another — when 
we have a sense of the pain — has been made to pro- 
duce an emotion of pity, which is merely reflected 
suffering, and therefore cannot be pleasure. But 
it is a proof that humankind may see pain without 
feeling it ; and it is simply because the wantonly 
cruel do not feel, and have no sense of the suffer- 
ings they inflict, that they find delight in witness- 
ing the writhings of the death-throes of their 
fellows. Besides, such people are barbarously 
curious, Ben, to see how the sentient creature will 
behave under the trying circumstances ; and hence, 
as with the boys in the fable, even the death of 
another being becomes sport to them — owing to 
the novelty and extravagance of the contortions 
induced by the bodily agony." 

" Oh, I see," the boy exclaimed, "it is merely 
unfeeling curiosity, then, that makes boys and 
others so cruel as they are." 

" Yes, Ben, it is the prurience — the itch of 
morbid, unfeeling curiosity, as you say," added the 
tutor ; " and directly we begin to think and feel at 
the foot of the gallows, why we get sick, and 



A PEEP IXTO THE HEART. 483 

swoon with a sense of the agony we are contem- 
plating." 

"I see! I see!" said the lad, thoughtfully, for 
lie was only too glad to be beaten on such a 
subject. 

"Well, but though we do not like pain for 
pain's sake," Uncle Ben went on, "nor love it 
with the l sarne disinterested love as we do good- 
ness ; nevertheless there are certainly times when 
the infliction of pain upon a human being, or even 
an animal, becomes an intense delight to our soul. 
* Eevenge is sweet,' says the proverb, but though it 
assuredly is sweet at the moment of gratification — 
most sweet to the savage unthinking nature, to give 
wound for wound, and even a hundred heavy 
wounds for one little one ; nevertheless, ungratified 
revenge is by no means sweet, but simply the 
bitterest and most galling passion — the ugliest 
and sharpest stinging of all the appetites that can 
stir our nature. The hunger for blood and human 
agony is the acutest form of all hunger that man 
can possibly suffer ; and the wretch who suffers it 
feels all the torments of the starving man upon a 
raft at sea, racked with a million-fold the agonies 
of starvation. Hence, lad, beware how you hug the 
viper to your bosom ; for, rely upon it, in seeking 
to compass the misery of another, you compass 
your own, to a far greater degree than you can 
ever hope to wreak it upon your enemy — since the 
revengeful man suffers all the protracted agony of 
an enduring devilish temper, that is for ever rank- 
ling, (as if he had a thorn in his heart,) with all 
the long continued gnawing of an ugly fester; 
whereas the object of the passion can only be made 
to feel the mere spasm of the temporary wound 
the other hopes and longs to inflict upon him." 

" Well then, uncle, revenge," the pupil chimed 
in — " revenge is not sweet ; it is silly." 



464 YOUNG BENJAMIN FRANKLIN. 

44 Silly as madness, child," was the answer; 
" so cut it out of your heart, Ben, while your heart 
is young and generous, and keep your eyes for 
ever fixed upon the true nobility of the New Com- 
mandment, which enjoins us to 'love our enemies.' 
Love them, I say to you, for your own sake — for 
the very happiness there is in loving any one. 
It may be haid work for poor human nature to 
compass, and require the highest human heroism 
to be able, even in our mortal agony, to cry, 
1 Father, forgive them, they know not what they 
do ;' but it is possible to grow such a spirit of 
wise kindness in our heart, that if we cannot 
forget a wrong, we shall, at least, have common 
worldly prudence enough to forgive it. Nor can 
I leave this part of my subject, boy, without here 
enforcing upon you what has always appeared to 
me one of the strongest proofs of the divine origin 
of this same New Commandment itself. It is 
merely human to desire blood for blood; this is 
only the bright-red glaring justice of man in the 
rough ; and, therefore, to love the blood-shedder is 
not human ; it is more than human, and is so utterly 7 ' 
out of the natural course and current of our feelings 
and thoughts, that no mere man could ever have 
conceived the wondrous wisdom and godliness 
there is in the precept ; and, certainly, no mere 
man could have given us in his life so lucid an 
example of the beauty and magnanimity of the 
creed: no ordinary bit of humanity could have 
done this any more than he could have conceived 
and compassed Creation. I say, the very thought 
itself is beyond the bounds of human imagination 
and human aspiration to come at; for if it be 
impossible as all allow, for the fancy of man to con- 
ceive a new sense — another sense superadded to 
our faculties, that is not a compound of two or more 
of our existing senses : then as assuredly no mere 



A PEEP INTO THE HEART. 465 

man's brain and heart could ever have had an ink- 
ling of this supremely new sense — this most unna- 
tural impulse to turn the other cheek when one 
has been smitten, and to bless them that persecute 
yon/ 1 

"I understand you, uncle," answered the lad, 
" and thank you kindly for the thought." 

" Well, Ben, I hate chattering religion even to 
you, boy," the godfather proceeded. "It is a 
thing for the heart to feel, and not for the brain to 
talk about ; indeed, it is the natural communication 
between man and God, and not between man and 
man, who can have no possible 'right to interfere in 
such matters," said the old Puritan, with no little 
emphasis on the word. 4t But this is not religion, 
lad : it is philosophy — philosophy counselling the 
heart, and not bigotry striving to proselytize it." 

" But, uncle, do you know, I've been thinking all 
this while," confided the simple little pupil, " why, 
if revenge is so wrong and so natural, that it 
wanted Christ himself to come and teach us the 
New Commandment, why such a feeling should 
have been given to us at all ?" 

"Ah, lad, that why is always a puzzler; your 
final causes, as they are called, are difficult things 
for poor finite reason to come at," sighed Uncle 
Benjamin. "A mere solitary brick can ^ never 
give us an idea of the architecture of the entire 
palace. Nevertheless, Ben, we can get just a 
twinkle of light sometimes ; and so it is with our 
malevolent feelings, which are far from being so 
utterly bad as you imagine. Indeed, if man had not 
been made to grow angiy and savage at any inter- 
ference with the objects of his desires, he would 
have been but a poor sluggish brute ; and certainly 
would never have wrought a tithe of the grand 
achievements he has in the world. We are angry 
even with the stocks and stones in nature, Ben, 

2 H 



46G YOUNG BENJAMIN FRANKLIN. 

when they offend us, either by injuring or impeding 
us. A baby delights to beat the chair or table that 
has hurt it, and even a great man glories in crush- 
ing the obstacles that cumber the road to some 
grand end. This conquest of difficulties is, as I 
before said, one of man's finest triumphs, and if 
we were not angry with the mountains that oppose 
our progress, we should never cut through them ; if 
the fetters did not gall our flesh, we should remain 
willing slaves all our lives. Hannibal's proudest 
feat was to force his way across the Alps, rather 
than to slink round the base of them ; and he must 
have felt a finer triumph in vanquishing the very 
mountains, than he ever did in battling with any 
human host. So our old friend Columbus, too, 
when he beheld the morning sun crimsoning the 
shores he had been so long in quest of, must have 
gloried more in having conquered the sea itself, 
than in having mastered his mutinous crew, and 
humbled the pride of the kings who had treated 
his scheme with scorn. We like to crush under 
our heel the stones that are the stumbling-blocks 
in our way ; and it is only when we have so little 
sense of human error and human misery that we 
treat men as stones — and consequently wish to 
destroy or bruise the hearts of our fellow- creatures 
— that the malevolent spirit runs riot, and converts 
a principle that was meant to stir us to do the 
grandest work, into a bit of devilry compassing 
the bloodiest ends." 

"Isn't it strange," little Ben exclaimed, "that 
the same feeling should be both good and bad ! 
for, if I understand you, uncle, it is only wrong to 
feel angry towards men ; but when we are roused 
with a desire to beat down some great difficulty, 
there is no harm in the feeling." 

44 Ay, my boy, it is the difference between use 
and abuse. The destructive propensity of our 



A PEEP IXTO THE HEART. 4G7 

nature may lead to murder : it should lead to the 
grandest engineering in life — the cutting through 
the mountains of circumstances that appear to wall 
in our existence. Xor is the malevolent or angry 
feeling always had : even when exercised against 
our fellow-creatures, Ben. Maudlin benevolence 
is the very dotage of weak and fatuous humanity. 
•Some people have such mere milk-sop hearts that 
they cannot bear to punish. But punishment, 
Ben, is simply moral surgery, and the rod is as 
necessary as the knife — riot the knife of the butcher, 
nor the rod of the tyrant ; but each used with all 
the tenderness of a kind and loving hand. To 
cuddle and caress the criminal, lad, is to behave as 
if we were in love with criminality ; but to treat 
a criminal as he should be treated, is to inflict 
upon him some bodily penance, that will have the 
effect of developing the natural remorse and con- 
trition of his heart — to do this with no revengeful 
spirit, but with the merciful regard of chastening, 
rather than chastising him ; but still, never to for- 
get that penance is necessary for penitence, and 
that penitence alone can turn and soften the heart. 
Hence, I say, as little punishment as possible, but 
still penance sufficient to awaken penitence, and 
depend upon it, we are the criminal's best friend 
after all." 

The subject was exhausted, and the uncle came 
and stood by the boy at the table, watching the 
pr ogress of his sketch ; and when he had put in a 
few touches for the lad, and shown him how to 
whisk out the high lights with the corner of his 
handkerchief, he began striding the room again, 
as he resumed the thread of his theme. 

" The next unselfish emotion that we have to 
treat of, lad," he went on talking and walking, " is 
that of emulation, or the pleasure me derive from 
excelling or surpassing others. Ambition, I have before 

2 h 2 



468 YOUNG BENJAMIN FRANKLIN. 

told you, is the love of power, or rather the love of 
the deference and court that is paid to power — 
tyranny being the mere love of the power itself. 
But emulation or rivalry is simply the love of 
racing upon the great human race-course of life ; 
and there are social jockeys who find intense delight 
in being ' up in the stirrup,' as it is called, and in 
whipping and spurring the beast they are mounted 
upon, in the hot struggle to win some paltry prize 
by a neck. Now jockeys, lad, are proverbial for 
their love of jockeying ; and a fierce spirit of rivalry 
is not the temper that prompts the soul to acts of the 
purest honesty, or the brightest generosity. More- 
over, there is always this bitter drawback, even 
to the greatest good luck when one man gambles 
against another — that the winner makes a beggar 
of his antagonist; and even so the delight of 
distancing others is but sorry child's play, and 
leads to a whole host of heart-burnings and feuds 
among those who are left behind, and that only for 
the glory of the one greedy and over-reaching 
nature that wins. It is this petty racing spirit 
that sets every one struggling now-a-days to get 
out of their own sphere and class. The servant 
longs to leave off her caps, and go up and sit in 
the parlour like her mistress ; and the mistress 
longs, in her turn, to be out riding in her carriage 
like ' my lady.' There is no such thing as con- 
tentment — all is scramble, struggle, greed, and 
rivalry. And yet, exalt the servant into the mis- 
tress, and the mistress into ' my lady,' and see how 
the parvenue is laughed at and despised; for the 
bird which has escaped from its cage is almost 
sure to be pecked to death by the old wild ones. 
However, lad, when the love of excelling is 
limited to the love of excellence, it is one of the 
grandest pleasures of which our nature is sus- 
ceptible ; and this, when combined with the power 



A PEEP INTO THE HEART. 469 

to excel, is simply human genius. For this love 
of excellence is not the desire to distance men, but 
merely to surpass certain works — to transcend 
certain beauties. There is none of the chafing of 
vulgar, worldly competition in it ; but it is merely 
a craving to approximate perfection. Indeed, in 
its highest and purest form, it has no sense of man- 
kind — no sense of opposing interest, nor desire to 
trip others up by the heels ; but only a sense of 
the work itself, and to make it better than what 
has been done before. It is this feeling which is 
the cause of all human improvement, as well as of 
all human excellence itself. 

" There is now but one other feeling to be de- 
scribed," added the old man, "and then we shall 
have exhausted this division of the unselfish emo- 
tions of man." 

" What is that, uncle ?" the boy inquired. 

" The love of conquering others" was the answer; 
" though I have before spoken of this so fully, while 
treating of the love of success and the love of 
power, that only a few words need be said further 
upon the matter. The love of conquering is really 
the love of humbling the proud — for there is little 
pleasure in depressing those who are already de- 
pressed. The higher the enemy we vanquish, the 
greater the delight of the victory. Now it was 
this love of humbling, that made the warriors of 
old find such pleasure in enslaving the conquered ; 
and ready as the world always has been to worship 
the conqueror, still the worship has been that of awe 
rather than veneration — the sacrifice paid to the 
blood-stained pagan idol, in the hope of appeasing 
his love of slaughter. Hence, you see, lad, the 
delight of triumphing over our fellows consists of 
the composite charm of enslaving others and 
elevating ourselves — of putting our heel on the 
neck of one who was once as proud as we, and 



470 YOUNG BENJAMIN FEANKLIX. 

feeling ourselves a few inches higher, because w& 
are lifted up on the poor pedestal of another's car- 
cass. This is but petty posture-master work at 
best, Ben ; and there is too little real elevation, and 
too much human debasement about it, too many 
victims and only one victor, to please me. Never- 
theless, when the same passion is applied to the 
conquest of the great host of circumstances with 
which we have always to battle— to the beating 
down of difficulties, and to the enslaving of the 
giant forces of the world in which we live, and 
making them work for the benefit of mankind, 
I know no ovation that can be too grand for such 
a bloodless and yet glorious victory.' 5 

THE UNSELFISH EMOTIONS 

Which arise when others are affected in a particular 
manner, but not by ourselves. 

" Let me see," said little Ben, " what have you 
got to do now? We have done the unselfish 
emotions which — are — which — how did you ex- 
press it, uncle ?" 

' 'The unselfish emotions that spring up in the 
bosom, when we ourselves affect others in a parti- 
cular manner," the old man prompted the boy ; 
"and now we have to do those which arise when 
others are affected in a particular manner, but not 
by ourselves." 

" Oh, yes!" repeated Ben, " when others are 
affected by ourselves, and when others are affected, 
but not by ourselves. I think, uncle, you said 
sympathy belonged to the latter class." 

The elder Benjamin returned no direct answer 
to the question, but merely said, "Why do we 
turn sick at the sight of blood, Ben ?" 

The bov stared, as if he wondered what that 



A PEEP IXTO THE HEART. 471 

could have to do with the subject, and replied, 
" I'm sure I can't say, uncle." 

u Well, lad, in itself," went on the old man, 
" there is nothing particularly repulsive about the 
vital fluid; indeed, the colour is so intense, the 
crimson so fine, that naturally it should be a 
pleasing object to look upon. An infant would 
dabble in it with delight; and yet the sight of it 
often makes stout-hearted men swoon." 

The boy still stared with wonder at what it all 
meant. 

" Why, Ben, as the blaze of that old smith's 
forge is winsome, with the snow lying thick upon 
the ground, because of the imaginary sense of 
warmth it gives us amid all the cold ; so blood is 
sickening to us, because the imagination has a 
sense of the wound which caused it to flow, and of 
the suffering and danger connected with the spill- 
ing of it. It is this working of the imagination 
that lies at the very bottom of our feeling of 
sympathy." 

" Oh, I see," young Benjamin murmured out. 

" Had we been made as unsympathetic and un- 
imaginative as leeches, the sight of the vital fluid 
would have delighted us as much as them," the 
teacher proceeded ; " and it is because some people 
have more or less imagination than others, that 
they have more or less pity for the afflicted. This 
is the reason why spectacles of human agony, 
that stir some to their heart's core, can be wit- 
nessed by others without even a qualm ; and why 
surgeons cease after a time to be unmanned as 
it is called, during their operations ; because, after 
considerable practice, the surgical mind becomes 
too intent upon the cure to think any longer of 
the suffering. So that, you see, the feeling of 
sympathy has no more selfishness about it, than 
there is selfishness in being pleased with the sight 



472 YOUNG BENJAMIN FRANKLIN. 

of a clean white garment in summer, and which 
is pleasing to us, simply, because it revives in 
our mind a sense of the coolness of snow." 

"Of course there isn't!" cried the little fellow. 
" I can see it now quite plainly." 

" Now, Ben, this feeling of sympathy springs 
out of the very constitution of the human mind, 
having its source in what is called the association 
of ideas, and thus it becomes a thorough funda- 
mental element of our nature ; so that we cannot 
but regard it as part of the wise and merciful 
ordinations of creation, that we should suffer with 
the suffering, and rejoice with the joyful. This 
sympathy of ours is the nerve-string that unites 
all the different members of the human family 
into one consentaneous body — with but 'one com- 
mon heart among all. This is the little cobweb 
fibre that weaves and knits the gossamer threads 
of life into the one perfect social web ; this the 
wondrous cause of the widening circles in the 
pool, making the whole mass pulse and vibrate 
directly one little particle of it is stirred : for if the 
whole human fraternity were bound together, each 
to each, with a band of living flesh stretching from 
bosom to bosom, and quickened with the same 
blood and reticulated with the same nerves — so 
that though there were many bodies, there was but 
one common sensorium, one common life among the 
whole — man could not be more surely bound to man 
than he is by the ligaments and tissues, as it were, 
of his sympathetic emotions. True, we do not see 
the spiritual band, we only feel it ; but assuredly 
it exists as much as if we could press the warm 
life-bond in our hands. All that is wanted is 
that we should think when misery is presented to 
us, and then we must feel — the thoughtless alone can 
be indifferent. It is impossible that even the 
meanest and the vilest should suffer, and we not 



A PEEP INTO THE HEART. 473 

feel a pity for their sufferings — if we will but let 
the common course of our intellectual nature 
work as it was meant to do ; and it is only the fool 
that suffers misery to endure without feeling it, or 
without a wish, if not an endeavour, to relieve it." 

" How beautifully it is all arranged, to be sure, 
uncle," was all the little fellow had to say. 

"Beautiful!" echoed Uncle Ben; "why, the 
heavens themselves are not more beautiful than is 
the heart of man, if we will but look into it, as 
closely as star-gazers love to scan the glories of the 
firmament. And see here, lad," he went on : 
" there is the same mighty principle of harmony 
running through the human heart as there is in 
the great womb of space itself. What is it that 
keeps the planets for ever circling in their course ? 
Newton has given us the golden key to the 
mystery. There are two forces ever at work, he 
shows us, throughout all nature ; the one a mere 
impetus, driving the orbs in the direction of the 
force that has been originally impressed upon them, 
and limited to the mere moving body itself; and 
the other a mighty spirit of attraction, extending 
throughout the entire universe and tending to 
draw every body, each towards the other : hence, 
one power tends to drive the moving body in a 
straight line, and the other to draw it down 
towards the centre of the entire world-system 
itself; so that by the two acting at right angles 
to one another, a balance is produced, and a series 
of movements in diagonals is the result, ending 
in the describing of one continuous and perfect 
circle. Fling a stone straight along in the air, and 
you will find it describe a curve, Ben, a curve 
that is brought to an abrupt termination only by 
the ground on which it fell. It flies in a straight 
line from your hand, lad ; the earth draws it down 
and down to the ground ; and so it goes sweeping 



474 YOUNG BENJAMIN FRANKLIN. 

on, falling and falling as it rushes through the 
air, and describing the same ever-bending line as 
even a planet itself in its course." 

" But what has this to do with sympathy ?■" said 
the boy. 

" Listen, Ben," the old man added; " there are 
the same rectangular forces for ever at work in 
the moral world as in the stellar one. The selfish 
force drives man away from home in quest of 
the objects of his wants and desires: his appe- 
tites and his impulses are the impetus which stirs 
him in this direction, and which keeps him for 
ever moving in his own individual path. But the 
unselfish force of sympathy, the mighty and 
invisible power of human attraction, which causes 
every human heart to tend and gravitate, as it 
were, to every other human heart, and which 
reaches to the furthermost corners of the earth, 
makes him revert to the centre of the social circle 
in which he dwells ; and thus the two moral 
powers, working in unison, cause him to move 
harmoniously in the orbit that has been marked 
out for him ; so that, while seeking his own good, 
he is for ever fulfilling his loving offices as well 
as the duties of kinship, friendship, or citizenship 
to those about him." 

u Oh, wonderful ! most wonderful!" exclaimed 
the youth, who was now able to see and compre- 
hend what was meant by the emotion of sympathy. 

" And now, Ben, let me beg of you, lad, ever to 
bear in mind," the earnest old man concluded, 
" that you have been so constituted that a fellow- 
creature's misery, not only should never be a matter 
of indifference to you, but (if you will only 
think as a man — if you will but attend to the 
misery, and not avert your eyes and heart from it) 
you have been made so that it cannot possibly be 
indifferent to you. For as it has been arranged 



A PEEP INTO THE HEART. i<0 

that the infection of one happy, smiling face 
should make others feel disposed to smile too, so, 
lad, the sight of a sorrowing countenance is like 
the sight of blood, to unhardened natures ; it makes 
the heart sick with the fellow-sorrow it breeds 
within it. Still this sickness, boy, is no morbid 
disease, but merely the sickness of the yearning 
appetite of our common humanity to heal the 
ugly mental sore — to pour oil into the wound that 
it pains us to look upon. It only wants a half- 
pennyworth of oil in the palm, I told you before, 
Ben, for a man to be able to play the good Sama- 
ritan any day ; and, depend upon it, charity lies 
not in munificence of gifts (which are often only 
the mere lacquer of brazen ostentation) ; but in 
tenderness of heart, in mercifulness of thought, in 
kindliness of construction, and in willingness to 
serve and tend, rather than in readiness to give 
and depart. To. the suffering, sympathy alone is 
all-sufficient : one tear-drop is of more value to the 
honest aching heart than a guinea at any time. It 
is only the born beggars and canting impostors 
that put a market-price upon human commisera- 
tion. A few minutes by the sick bed, a single up- 
ward glance of the eyes, one tender tone, a gentle 
pressure of the palm, are worth more to the suffer- 
ing poor than a whole volume of stock sentiment, 
a purseful of gold, or a prayer-book full of mere 
magpie religion. The kindly look and the com- 
forting word we can always give ; and these, 
depend upon it, are the true oil of good Samaritan- 
ship— the oil that is a very balm to the heart- 
sore; — these, the widow's mites that all can drop 
into the poor-box, and which are greater in value 
than all other gifts that can be cast into the 
human treasury. If it were not thus, what signi- 
ficance could there be in the proverb which says, 
' what would the poor do without the poor ?' for 



476 YOUNG BENJAMIN FRANKLIN. 

the poor have only the comfort of commiseration 
to give to the poor, and this, which transcends all, 
they certainly give beyond all. The easy good- 
ness of a ' subscription ' sums up the charity of the 
rich ; nights of long watching, days of tender 
nursing, neglect of work, loan of bedding and 
clothing, and a hundred other precious little boun- 
ties make up, on the other hand, the untrumpeted 
munificence of those who have nothing to give." 

" What would the poor do without the poor?'' 
repeated young Ben, half sorrowfully to himself. 

" And now, lad, remember, I say again," Uncle 
Ben added, " poverty and suffering ' ye shall ever 
have with you ;' so do you have always a sense that 
three fourths of the human race are born to want 
and hardship ; do you have a sense, in the midst of 
the misery that encompasses you, like the very 
air you breathe, that the poor are God's own poor 
— that the bitter heritage is theirs for some inscru- 
table purpose ; and do you have still a sense, that 
if you can give no worldly gift, at least you have 
it ever in your power to give the infinitely higher 
one of the sweet comfort of commiseration, and 
that you are a better and more hopeful man if you 
cast but a wish that it were otherwise, into the 
treasury." 

" I will have this sense, uncle," the earnest- 
natured boy cried out, " for now that you have 
given it me, it shall never die in me, depend upon 
it." 

" That's hard and hazardous to promise, Ben," 
added the other ; " the cold shade of worldly pride 
can soon numb it, and make the fine nerve as 
callous as the veins in marble. Beware of worldly 
success, lad, for this, in most cases, is moral failure. 
It wants but little dignity of soul to fail well, 
for sorrow and trouble generally chasten the heart, 
so as to enable even a small man to play the 



A PEEP INTO THE HEART. 477 

martyr in a small way ; but to succeed grandly is 
trie most trying thing, even to a hero's nature. 
The little ant-hill on which we have raised our- 
selves looks so like a mountain under the micro- 
scope of our own vanity, and we are so prone to 
believe that the vantage ground has been built up 
by our own spade and shovel, rather than by the 
million little busy things for ever labouring around 
us — so ready to look at these little labourers 
through the wrong end of the telescope, and see 
them infinitely smaller than they are — so quick to 
believe that the old friends whom we have out 
jockeyed in the world's race have but sorry hacks 
to carry them — so proud to stick the trumpery 
' plate ' we have won in the ' heat ' upon our own 
sideboard, and flash it in the eyes of the vulgar — 
and so credulous to believe, with the mythologists 
of old, that it's only the really great men that are 
raised to the glory of the s stars,' and to find our 
gods merely in the stellar world of humanity — we 
are so disposed to do all this, I say, that it is difficult 
to find the successful man who advances through 
life, like the rower who understands the right use 
of a scull, — with his eyes continually fixed upon 
the scenes he has left behind, and his back 
turned, even while he is ever respectful, to all 
that lies ahead of him." 

Uncle Ben's staunch Puritan spirit rang out in 
every word of the speech as he uttered it, and it 
was manifest in the tone and temper with which 
he spoke, that the hatred of servility, and the love 
of hearty, but not arrogant independence, was the 
marked characteristic of his nature. 

Presently he wound up with, " There, Ben, we 
have pretty well cropped out our subject, for it 
would be idle, after what I have said to you about 
the feeling of sympathy — underlying as it does 
almost the whole of our unselfish emotions — to do 



478 YOUNG BENJAMIN FRANKLIN. 

oilier than enumerate to you the feelings which 
I have grouped under this second division of the 
class. Let me just run over the heads of them, 
and then an end. Thus we find not only a plea- 
sure in sympathizing with the sufferings of 
others, or rather in relieving or comforting the 
sufferers, but also a pleasure in rejoicing at the 
happiness of our fellow-creatures, and this pro- 
ceeds from what is termed the emotion of con- 
gratulation ; that is to say, of feeling the same 
gratefulness at any good which occurs to others as 
they themselves do. Then again, we are capable 
of finding a savage delight in exulting and triumph- 
ing over the downfall of those we detest, even as we 
can derive pleasure from the worldly success of 
those in whom we feel an interest ; so, too, we can 
be even base enough to feel a charm in gloating 
over the miseries and afflictions of such as we 
believe to be our enemies, and which is, as it 
were, the savage sympathy of malevolence, rather 
than the tender pity of the benevolent feelings. 
These, Ben, with the exception of the emotion of 
envy, or covetous longing, which we feel for those 
possessions of others to which we fancy we 
have no claim, and that of jealousy, or savage 
greed of those possessions to which we fancy we 
have a claim, or to which we aspire, — these, I 
believe, make up the whole of the feelings under 
consideration, and so far as I know, exhaust the 
matter of the entire moral emotions — selfish as 
well as unselfish — themselves.'' 



470 



CHAPTER XXIV. 

THE STILL, SMALL VOICE. 

"I suppose you're going to tell me now, uncle, 
about the prison and the poor-house, and to show 
me what are the duties of life ; just as you did 
with the amusements, you know ?" observed young- 
Benjamin, as he shook the crumbs from the dinner 
cloth into the fender, and proceeded to fold it. 

" Xo, I'm not, lad," the elder Benjamin 
answered, stretching his legs, and leaning well 
back in his chair, as if he was settling down for a 
doze rather than a chat. " We're not ready for 
the lesson yet, boy. Before we try to read Greek, 
we must learn the Greek alphabet, and as yet we're 
only half-way through the A B C of morality." 

"What! is there more to do about the moral 
pleasures then, uncle?" cried the little fellow, 
somewhat disappointed. 

"Yes, more," rejoined the teacher; "a little 
more schooling of the heart, Ben, and then you 
will be ready to appreciate the moral of the long 
story. Up to this time, lad, we have been dealing 
with the pleasures that arise from the perception 
of some good or evil accruing to ourselves or 
others. But there is something more than good 
and evil in the moral world: there is the little 
matter of right and wrong, boy ; and that is a nut 
that needs good sound teeth to crack, I can tell 
you. Xow if I were to ask' you, Ben, what is 
right and what is wrong, you'd begin by saying — " 

" Xow just let me speak for myself, sir," inter- 



489 YOUNG BENJAMIN FRANKLIN. 

rapted the boy, playfully, as he began to spread 
his sketch and colours before him again ; " let me 
see. Well, I should say it was right to speak 
the truth, and wrong to tell a lie; that it was 
wrong to steal, and right to give every man his 
due, as father says — and so on, you know." 

" Ay, I knew you would," returned the uncle ; 
" and yet you've told me nothing, you little gos- 
ling, about what is either right or wrong in itself. 
You've only informed me that John is a man, 
when I didn't want to be made acquainted with 
what kind of an animal John was, but merely 
with what class of creature a man belonged to. 
What, I say again, is right per se — right in itself 
— right in the abstract, as the schoolmen say ?" 

" Well, I should say that's right which isn't 
wrong, then!" cried the eager lad, endeavouring 
to make something like a guess at the riddle. 

■ " Yes, but what's wrong ? that which isn't right, 
I suppose you'd say ; and so there we should keep 
shuffling our feet backwards and forwards, like 
soldiers halting on a march, and yet never 
advancing a step ;" and as the old man said the 
words, he shook his head and smiled at the inno- 
cence of the puzzled youngster. " Well, lad, let's 
give you a helping hand up the ship's side before 
we weigh anchor, and tell you that right is lite- 
rally what is ruled; what is ordained; what is 
straightforward, or done directly, in obedience to 
some command." 

" Well, but, uncle," argued the plain-spoken 
little fellow, "if you were to tell me to go and 
steal, as I have heard you say the gipsy mother 
does to her child, immediately after it has said its 
prayers, that wouldn't be right for me to do ; and 
yet if I did so I should only be acting in obedi- 
ence to a command, as you say." 

" It would be right, lad — " 



4 

THE STILL, SMALL VOICE. 481 

"0 — oh, uncle!" cried the boy, breaking into 
the middle of the sentence. 

" Eight in an unthinking child, Ben," concluded 
the godfather; "but you know that the command 
would be at variance with a superior command 
that we are bound to listen to, above all others. 
The subject, therefore, becomes narrowed into, 
what commands are we, like dutiful children, to 
attend to." 

" 1 know what you mean, uncle," said the 
youngster, a little discomfited. 

" No you don't, Ben," was the rejoinder, "for, 
remember, I'm not talking religion to you. I am 
merely endeavouring to help you to spell out the 
laws of the heart, lad — the commands of what is 
called the conscience ; and I want to let you see 
there are natural commandments as well as 
spiritual ones, and that the ordinations of nature 
are and should be the # same law to us as even the 
law of the Bible itself; for law is simply that 
which is laid dov:n> or enjoined for our obedience. 
The laws of what is called nature are but the law-, 
of the one great Lawgiver after all ; and therefore 
must be one and the same law. The three great 
breaches of the various forms of law in the world 
make the three great human errors. Thus, Sin is 
what is contrary to divine law, or the breach of 
some religious commandment or ordination of the 
great Euler of all ; Vice what is contrary to some 
moral law, or the breach of some righteous com- 
mandment or ordination of nature ; and Crime, 
that which is contrary to some social law, or the 
breach of some politic commandment or ordina- 
tion of the rulers of the land." 

" I see ! I see !" again murmured the youth. 

"Now some, I should tell you, in all honesty, 
my little man," the elder Benjamin continued, 
" have gainsay ed this doctrine I am propounding 

2 i 



4:82 YOUNG BENJAMIN FRANKLIN. 

to you, and have urged, that if right be mere 
obedience to orders, God, if He had so pleased, 
might have ordained a code of laws the very oppo- 
site to that of the ten commandments ; and would 
it then be right, they ask, to plunder and slay? 
But the simple answer, lad, is ' yes ;' for then we 
should have been so constituted that slaughter 
and pillage would have been the one great good to 
us, even as they are to some warring nations in 
Christendom to this day. Nevertheless, the All- 
wise and All-merciful never could have willed and 
ordained wrong, right ; any more than He could 
have willed two and two to be five. As it is, how- 
ever, it has assuredly been made part of the wise 
and merciful ordinations of nature — not only that 
we should love the man who does a benefit, and 
does it for the pure sake of benefiting, but — 
that we should believe that the benefactor acts 
rightly in so doing ; even as we have been made 
to feel satisfied that the malefactor does what is 
wrong.'" 

" Yes, uncle, and you are right too," added little 
Ben; " right in what you say, and acting rightly 
in saying it, because I can feel how much it 
benefits me." 

" Well then, Ben," the other went on, "we 
now see what is right and wrong; we see that 
right, morally speaking, is merely what is conform- 
able to the commands of the conscience ; and con- 
science is simply moral consciousness — an intuition 
which springs up within us that certain human 
conduct is contrary to the ordinations of nature, 
immediately such conduct comes to be judged by 
the natural instincts of the heart. Moral right 
then, lad, is that which is agreeable to the 
decisions of the moral judgment, and these decisions 
of the moral judgment are simply what are called 
sentiments" 



THE STILL, SMALL VOICE. 483 

"TVhy, I thought, uncle, a sentiment was 
merely an opinion," interposed young Ben. 

" So it is, boy ; an opinion begotten by a feel- 
ing," ran the reply ; " but it is not a mere judicial 
opinion. I have, for instance, an opinion that it 
will rain to-morrow, and that is simply a purely 
intellectual opinion, because my intellect alone is 
concerned in coming to the decision ; but I have 
an opinion also that vice is hateful, and that is a 
sentiment, because both the intellect and the emo- 
tions are engaged in forming the judgment." 

" So," said little Ben, ; ' a sentiment is an 
opinion begotten by a feeling." 

" Yes, Ben ; we speak of sentimental novels, 
and a mother's sentiments about her child, and so 
forth, meaning thereby neither passion, emotion, 
nor temper, but merely the opinions engendered 
by such emotions and tempers," explained the 
tutor. u And now, having pointed out to you 
the pleasures of the emotions themselves, I shall 
proceed at once to show you what are the delights 
of the sentiments. Though even before doing 
this, I should say a few words to you on the world 
of opinion in which we live ; for the moral senti- 
ments are divisible into three classes, like the 
emotions from which they spring, and may be 
described as — -(1) Sentiments engendered in 
us by our opinion of ourselves; (2) Sentiments 
engendered in us by our opinion of others ; and 
(3) Sentiments engendered in us by others' opinion 
of us. Hence you perceive how much of human 
happiness depends upon mere opinion, and that 
we live in a world not only of sensation, thought* 
and emotion, but of opinion also." 

" So we do," chimed in the boy, " and yet I've 
heard people say they don't care about mere 
opinions, and father, I know, objects to senti- 
ment." 

2 i 2 



484 YOUNG BENJAMIN FRANKLIN. 

"Your father objects, Ben, as wise men do/' 
urged the elder Benjamin, "to that affectation of 
feeling which merely chatters sentiment — that is 
to say, which delivers the opinions of the emotions, 
without having any corresponding emotions to 
justify them." 

THE WORLD OF OPINION. 

" Now this world of opinion, my son, is as mar- 
vellous as the solid external world, or the fairy- 
like internal ideal world, in which we pass our 
lives. It is this which makes the Tomkinses 
live in continual terror of the Jenkinses; this 
which makes people clothe themselves in the most 
unseemly costumes at most unseasonable periods ; 
it is for this that people furnish their houses ; for 
this they wear their jewels ; for this they exhibit 
their plate, and dress their lackeys up like macaws ; 
and for this they keep their carriages : for all is 
done, not to please themselves, not to minister to 
their own comforts, nor to add to their own happi- 
ness, but merely to please their neighbours ; and 
yet not to please them either, as true kindness 
loves to please others, for the mere pleasure it 
finds in pleasing '; but to please them as actors 
strive to please, for the hollow vanity of the mere 
clapping of the hands they get from the spectators. 
And when we think that if there were only the 
same pains taken to benefit others as there is to 
please them, with the view of extorting the small 
encouragement of a pat on the back from the 
beholders, how different a world it might be ! why, 
then we can hardly help believing that the love 
of applause has turned this same world of ours 
into a playhouse, where scenery and decoration- , 
dress and mimicry, are the chief attractions of the 
time. Again, lad, it is for this mere opinion of 
people — the majority of whom can never be known 



THE STILL, SMALL VOICE. 485 

or seen, nor even heard of — that the author writes, 
the poet weaves his verses, the artist paints his 
pictures, and the warrior risks his life ; even as it 
is this same public opinion that the truly righteous 
man gives no heed to, and the martyr braves. 
Again, Ben, look at the tyranny of fashion, which 
is only public opinion expressed on the small 
matter of dress. Why, if Nero had passed an 
edict, condemning women to compress their ribs, 
for the greater part of their lives, in an iron-bound 
corselet, think how historians would have raved 
about the devilry of the ingenious inhumanity ; 
and yet one fashionable fool thinks it the perfec- 
tion of human beauty to cut her body into two 
compartments like a wasp, and to make them seem 
as if united by a mere ligature of a waist — and 
instantly the whole legion of fashionable fools 
voluntarily condemn themselves to the same tor- 
ture. One idiot again parts his hair down the 
middle, and then immediately every other idiot 
in the world falls to halving his locks in the same 
manner ; one monkey trims his whiskers this way, 
and instantly the wmole cageful of monkeys coax 
theirs into the same contortions ; one thinks it the 
acme of elegance to wear his hands in his breeches- 
pockets, and the next day nobody can keep their 
fingers out of the sides of their small-clothes. 
Surely, Ben, that little extra spoonful of brains 
which man has had given to him, to make him 
something more than an ape, has been wasted 
upon the majority of skulls ; for as we langh at 
the ortolan, that is fattened by being made to feed 
six times a day, by means of half a dozen sham 
sunrises per diem, in the shape of a lantern thrust 
every four hours in at a hole into a darkened cham- 
ber ; so these people of fashion are as silly as the 
poor deliciously-fat birds ; ever mistaking the 
light of a farthing rushlight for that of the true 



48 6 YOUNG BENJAMIN FRANKLIN. 

glory of the day, and tricked, by their love of 
paltry splendour, into the exaggeration of their 
bulk, only to tickle the taste of the voluptuary." 

He paused for a moment or two, and then added, 
"Nevertheless, Ben, this same world of opinion 
can w r ork its marvels as well as its follies. It was 
this that snatched Martin Luther from the stake, 
and this that drove the bigoted James from the 
English throne ; it is this, too, that keeps society 
in check far better than any statute-book could 
ever accomplish. Further, it is merely the still, 
small voice within us — the* outspeaking of the 
heart itself — that makes the murderer's sleepless- 
ness so terrible to him ; and it is this small voice 
again that makes the martyr find a consolation 
even in the flames." 

" Why, it seems, uncle, as if there were two sides 
to every one of our feelings," advanced the young- 
ster, ' ' for no sooner do you show me that what 
you called ma -ma-malevolence is bad, than you be- 
gin to let me see how good it can be, when properly 
used, to overcome the difficulties that plague us." 

" Yes, Ben," rejoined the uncle, " as even bene- 
volence itself may run into maudlin dotage." 

SENTIMENTS ENGENDERED IN US BY OUR OWN OPINION 
OF OURSELVES. 

" Now, my patient little listener, we will begin 
with the consideration of the first class of the 
moral sentiments, and what did I tell you they 
were, Ben?" 

" Here it is, uncle," cried the eager boy, for he 
had jotted it down again upon the paper before 
him; "sentiments engendered inns by our own opinion 
of ourselves.' 1 

" Just so, Ben," nodded Uncle Benjamin; "en- 
gendered, mark! for there is always a certain 



THE STILL, SMALL VOICE. 48 7 

amount of moral criticism, of pondering over and 
scrutinizing our own conduct, preceding the de- 
velop ment of the sentiment in our bosoms ; and 
then, according as we get to think well or meanly 
of ourselves, according as we pluck up our shirt- 
collars, and smile blandly at the image of our- 
fcelf in the ideal looking-glass ; or according as 
ve shake our head, and scowl at the reflection, 
so does the opinion that we form of ourselves 
blend with a certain affection of our nature, and 
become a sentiment of either self -appr -elation, or 
(Usop . as the case may be. N or does the 

process end here : for this sentiment of approba- 
tion or disapprobation unites again with the natural 
likhgsand dislikings of our natures, and develops, 
in its turn, an emotion of some form of lasting love, 
or hate for our own self: and thus we get to feel 
some one of those delicate shades and gradations 
of the affectionate emotions, that I before showed 
you make up the chromatic scale of love : the 
result of the entire mental process being the 
development of a feeling of self-respect, self- 
regard, self-esteem, self-admiration, or self-honour, 
even up to that form of self- worship and self- 
glorification which comes of self-veneration/' 

"Oh!" exclaimed the little fellow, delighted 
to be brought back again to the chain of love, 
" how plain and easy it seems to come, uncle !"' 

'•Ay, boy! it is easy to put the puzzle map 
together, when you are well up in the geography 
of the countries it relates to ; but it is no child's 
play, I can tell you. to make the map itself. It 
requires many long voyages of discovery, and many 
observations to be taken, before the longitude and 
latitude, and the bearings of the different points 
of the human mind and heart, can be settled ; and 
before the thoughts and feelings can be traced 
down as plainly as the land itself upon a chart, for 



488 YOUNG BENJAMIN FRANKLIN. 

our guidance. But oh ! these tropes and figures, 
Ben, they are the true flowers of speech, that always 
lead us children out of the hard, dry, dusty road be- 
fore us. Now, of all the different forms of self- 
love, my boy," he proceeded, "the only one that a 
truly wise and great man can ever allow himself 
to be seduced into, by the witchery of his owa 
conceit, is the one at the very bottom of the scale, 
viz., self-respect, and which is only just one rung 
of the ladder above utter indifference. The rest, 
lad, are all personal vanity and coxcombry ; 
for your fool has ever the crest of the coxccmb 
for his coat of arms. We might as well be down 
on our spiritual knees, worshipping the mud 
idol of our own selves, after we have tricked the 
dirty deity out in all the tinsel and trumpery 
jewelry of man's vanity, — as well do this as be for 
ever playing the ' fon,' like the spoony boy Nar- 
cissus, and making sheep's-eyes at our own florid 
portrait, as imaged in the shallow basin of the 
fountain of our own conceit. Depend upon it, lad, 
a man that knows himself thoroughly, knows that 
there is no beauty in him when he comes to be 
turned inside out ; for then there is such a 
hideous display of stomach and bile, that the 
human anatomy is by no means pleasant to behold. 
To see our own fetch at any time, Ben, should set 
the mind thinking how we should look in the felon's 
dock, at that great time when there is to be no 
special pleading, but all are to be judged as they 
really are, and might have been. The felon's 
dock, boy, tries the handsomest countenance ; and, 
rely on it, that many of those that seem to have 
angel's faces now, will look hardly a whit better 
or fairer than felons under the searching glance 
of the Great Judge's scrutiny. 

" I do not wish to knock all the self-love out of 
you, my little man," he added, "but I say, never 



THE STILL, SMALL VOICE. 489 

let your self-regard go beyond the bounds of self- 
respect — even if you can honestly mount so high. 
And beware of self- admiration and self-adulation. 
as you would wish to ward off madness and 
dotage. I do not wish to teach you that you are 
a born devil, my dear boy, for little children have 
been said by Him who knew them best, to be 
as pure as the kingdom of heaven ; but the mis- 
fortune is, the mirror grows tarnished by age, and 
soon ceases to reflect the light of the skies. I do 
not want you to believe there is no hope for you, 
for I tell you, lad, that you are ever hopeful; and 
that you can never be so utterly good, nor so utterly 
bad either, that there may not be hope of you 
still. Think of what you are, and for ever con- 
trast the image with what you might be. Have 
faith in the possible goodness of your own nature, 
even while you have a consciousness of the posi- 
tive shortcomings — the meanness and baseness of 
it ; have ever before you a pattern self for yourself 
to copy, and be for ever comparing your own self 
with your own model nature. Let the moral look- 
ing-glass reflect both back and front : look back, 
and have a sense of what a shapeless, soul-less 
bodily lump you are ; and then look frontward, and 
see God's image stamped upon your features : and 
after all, shake hands with yourself, and pledge 
your honour to yourself, that you will still strive 
and struggle to be the fine, upright, and fair-faced 
fellow you may be — and not the cringing and limp- 
ing moral hunchback which honest retrospection 
shows you are. Therefore, I say again to you, 
Ben, be ever self-respectful ; lift your hat, and bow 
your head to your own superior nature — that nature 
which is, and always should be in advance of you : 
but never be self-enamoured, and rather pass by 
your other self without so much as an approving 
nod, and hang your head in very shame at the 



490 YOUNG BENJAMIN FRANKLIN. 

shabbiness of the contemptible scoundrel, directly 
you are alive to the dirtiness of your friend. Self- 
respect and self -faith, Ben, these are the only self- 
sentiments that can be honestly encouraged, or 
even countenanced in the heart of man ; with the 
exception, indeed, of what is termed self-approbation 
— but certainly not self-satisfaction — at our own 
conduct." 

" You may depend on my minding what you 
say, uncle," the pupil assured the teacher. 
n " This sentiment of self-approbation, on the con- 
trary," the other went on, " is the immediate 
result of the operations of the conscience, or 
moral judgment ; for right and wrong are but the 
true and the false of the heart ; and the same 
faculty which compares, weighs, deliberates, and 
determines upon the rectitude or error of intel- 
lectual propositions, also comes to the decisions 
upon the propriety or impropriety of human con- 
duct. Hence, the feeling of approbation that en- 
sues in the mind, directly we have an intuitive per- 
ception that such an act is right , is tantamount to 
the feeling of conviction which follows, imme- 
diately we have an intuition that a certain state- 
ment is true ; and this explains why the morals 
of nations differ, in the same manner as different 
countries have different kinds of truths, and even 
different tastes — and that with one and the same 
nerves, brain, and heart. For as it is not true that 
there is no such thing as truth, so is it not right 
for sceptics to assert that there is no such thing 
as rectitude in the world ; since in the same man- 
ner as it is demonstrable from the very nature of 
the forms of things, that all the angles of a triangle 
must be equal to two right angles, so is it morally 
certain, from the very constitution of our innate 
sympathies and antipathies, that it is impossible 
the benefactor could ever be disapproved of for 



THE STILL, SMALL VOICE. 491 

benefiting others, for the pure sake of the benefit 
conferred ; especially when it is felt that he has 
violated no superior claim in so doing." 

" So then it is as plain to see what is right and 
wrong, as it is to tell what is true and false," mur- 
mured the younger Benjamin, still pondering 
on the problem. 

c 'As plain when the matter is self-evident," was 
the reply, " and yet as difficult when the relations 
are involved. ' Which was first,' says Plutarch, 
' the bird or the egg ?' — who can riddle the truth out 
of that vexed question. So, in like manner, we 
may ask which is first, country or child ? Brutus 
preferred his country ; should he have preferred 
his child ?" 

The boy was about to take up the gauntlet, and 
have a tilt with the old man in favour of "the 
child," but the uncle cut him short by crying, 
" To the point, boy ! to the point ! Now this 
feeling of self-approbation is the all-sufficient 
reward that good and great men work for. It is 
only the little moral fop that wants and craves 
for the approbation of others. Indeed, according 
as a man loves the applause of his own heart, or 
that of others, so are we enabled to gauge the 
greatness or littleness of his soul. The moral 
hero listens only to the voice within him, for this 
he knows is but the echo of the divine decrees 
— the whispering of an angel's tongue prompting 
him to the right course — the trumpet of the unseen 
herald proclaiming the law of nature to him, and 
crying 4 le red le veut ; and so the cheering of his 
own heart is like the music of the spheres to his 
conscience, — a soft mellifluent concord flowing out 
of the very harmony of things. But as for the ap- 
plause of others, what is it but the poor actor's re- 
ward ? and he who acts his part well ; who mimics 
the man of probity, honour, and loving-kindness to 



492 YOUNG BENJAMIN FRANKLIN, 

the life ; who can play the fine walking gentle- 
man with propriety in front of the foot-lights, 
even though he be the dirtiest and shabbiest of 
varlets when unseen of men, is sure to get a 
round or two for the claptrap moral sentiment 
that he invariably utters as he quits the scene. 
Be assured, lad, there are two standards of right 
and wrong, of dignity and villany : an external 
and an internal one ; and that the man who con- 
forms to the goodness of men, is the petty moral 
coxcomb, tricked in all the canting fashion of the 
time — the vagabond waif and stray that always 
goes with the current, — and ready even for can- 
nibalism, if human haunches came to be thought 
as thoroughly in good taste as those of venison ; 
whilst the man who studies only the goodness of 
his own heart, and squares his conduct with his 
conscience, has all the sturdy, stalwart element of 
the honest old martyr in his bosom — of the faithful 
seivant who likes always to have his orders direct 
from his master." 

" I can understand now, uncle, what is meant 
by listening to the voice of one's own con- 
science," the godson observed, "and shall strive to 
have always an easy one myself; and I know, 
mother has often told me how people suffer from 
remorse after a wicked act, and that it is only 
their own guilty conscience, as she says, upbraiding 
them for their wickedness." 

" And that brings me, lad, to the last part of 
our present theme," the godfather added, " namely, 
to the varied feelings of pleasure or pain which 
are developed in the bosom, directly we come to 
reflect upon our own conduct, and to approve 
or disapprove of what we have done. Some 
time ago I told you, that many of the emotions 
subsided into a subdued and more or less perma- 
nent form of pain or pleasure, which are called 



THE STILL, SMALL VOICE. 493 

' tempers ;' and so with the sentiments, Ben : 
many of them have a tendency to develop a vivid 
feeling, which has all the character of an emotion ; 
but with this simple distinction, that there is 
always a sense of right and wrong, approbation 
and disapprobation, connected with it, rather 
than merely good and evil. Such states of mind 
may be called moods, for they have also many of 
the characteristics of temper. Of these moods, 
the feelings of self-complacency and remorse may be 
cited as instances, proceeding as they do from 
certain sentiments which are engendered by our 
own opinion of ourselves ; so anger and gratitude 
are the moods of mind, begotten by the sentiments 
engendered by our opinion of others' conduct 
towards us, and thus we come to speak of an 
angry mood, and a remorseful mood ; even as there is 
again the proud mood, or the humble mood of mind, 
which arises whenever we compare our conduct, 
our gifts, or our possessions, with those of others, 
and think ourselves the better or worse for them 
than they. The delight of the feeling of self-com- 
placency which springs up within us, whenever 
we review our past conduct, and feel that we 
have violated no tie of kindred, broken no law" 
of nature in our acts, but that we have fulfilled 
some little of the duty that was imposed upon us, 
when we were ordained to form part of the great 
human chain, — each link for ever helping and 
being helped on by the rest through life, — this 
is the exquisite consolation of an easy conscience, 
which all allow to be the very summum bonum of 
existence — that fine foretaste of heavenly enjoy- 
ment which follows the consciousness of having 
done one good act ; of having foregone some little 
pleasure, suffered some little misery for the sake 
of another's happiness ; of having rendered back 
some fraction of those sifts which we hold on 



494 YOUNG BENJAMIN FEANKLIN. 

trust for the good of our fellows. This is given 
us as the liberal and honestly earned wages of 
good work in this world ; whereas, the applause 
of men is but the petty prize held out as a bribe 
for sorry workmen to try and work better. To 
strive to win the applause of our neighbours, 
however, for the mere sake of the trumpery vanity 
of the cheering voices, without doing the good 
for which alone the applause is honestly due, is 
to endeavour to trick the paymasters into paying 
the wages without doing the work at all. This 
is the true cheatery and infamy of modern society 
— the obtaining of moral credit under false pre- 
tences — the moral swindling that is daily practised 
by high and low, rich and poor, gentleman and 
sweep. Nevertheless, though we may cheat others, 
lad, we cannot well trick ourselves. We know 
our ingrained meanness, even though a hundred 
charity dinners toast and huzza at our mag- 
nanimity ; and even if the trickster be caught 
in his own trap, and be himself tricked, by the 
speciousness of the hollow plaudits, into the con- 
ceit that he is a bright grain of the salt of the 
earth, assuredly the time will come when the 
delirium of the fever shall pass away, and the 
soul shall be roused by an angel's trumpet out of 
the long trance that has been on it; and see 
itself as in a black mirror without a speck of 
colour to give a meretricious tone to the hard 
lines and ugly forms of the picture." 

Young Ben stopped painting, as his uncle halted 
a minute on coming to a resting-place in his 
discourse ; but the little fellow merely looked up 
to assure the old man that he was still ready for 
his words. 

" Eemorse, Ben, I should tell you, is not a 
necessary and immediate consequence of iniquity. 
A dog has no conscience, lad, and a man may live 



THE STILL, SMALL VOICE. 495 

the life of a dog ; "be as savage and remorseless 
as a bloodhound, or as pampered and inoffensive 
as a lap-dog, and yet be as unabashed as the 
mastiff or the poodle after all. To develop con- 
science, calm and patient reflection ? is requisite ; 
and if there be neither time nor humour for this, 
of course the great judging principle can never 
pass sentence, since the culprit has escaped trial. 
Nevertheless, if we be really something more 
than dogs — if we have a principle of volition 
within us — a principle that transcends organism, 
since its office is to be ever at war with the mere 
organic instincts of our nature, and if the dumb 
beasts have only these same organic instincts to 
guide them — surely we do not die the death of 
dogs ; and then how shall offended justice be 
filched of its due ? Eemorse may not come for a 
time ; it may remain as dead in us as the faculty 
of perceiving light and colour did in the born- 
blind boy, till he was couched by Cheselden ; but 
when we see — when the nine days' puppyhood of 
human life has passed away, and our eyes are 
fairly opened, and we come to behold ourselves 
as we really are — why then remorse shall burst 
upon the head like a storm — as assuredly as 
the thunder after excessive heat." 

SENTIMENTS ENGENDERED BY OUR OPINION OF OTHERS. 

" We now come to the sentiments engendered by our 
opinion of others, don't we, uncle ?" asked little Ben, 
as he turned to his paper, and refreshed his memory 
with the notes he had made. 

" Yes, my patient little philosopher," answered 
the uncle, who was not a little astonished at the 
boy's continuity of attention, " and the pleasure 
we derive from such sentiments consists chiefly 
in the delight we find in loving and being grate- 



496 YOUNG BENJAMIN FRANKLIN. 

£ul to others, as well as in approving and in 
thinking well of them; while, on the contrary, 
human nature is capable of finding a savage enjoy- 
ment in detracting from the merits of others — 
in censuring and satirizing them — as well as in 
venting our anger or indignation upon those who 
have either offended ourselves personally, or 
committed some flagrant injustice against our 
friends or neighbours ; for indignation is but 
sympathetic anger, the sense which makes us feel 
a wrong done to another, the same as if it had been 
done to us. And here I should point out to you 
what is the peculiar characteristic of this class 
of sentiments, namely, its tendency to inspire us 
with trust in those about us. For if we live in 
a world of opinion, lad, at least we live in a 
world of faith to give us confidence in the general 
probity of our fellows. Faith, Ben, is usually 
supposed to apply to religious matters, and to be 
that jorinciple of our soul which transcends reason 
as a means of developing belief. For instance, 
we cannot rationally understand the infinitude of 
space ; and yet we have a faith that the universe 
is endless, and feel morally certain that there 
cannot possibly be any limit or boundary to it, 
since if there be a wall round it, as you would 
say, boy, what is on the other side of the wall ?" 

" Ah, that's what I never could make out," the 
little fellow observed, ready to fly off into the 
new mystery. But the godfather was too intent 
upon the work he had in hand, to be drawn aside 
from his object; so he merely said, " No, nor the 
greatest philosopher either. However, Ben, faith 
is as necessary for worldly guidance as it is for 
transcendental knowledge itself; and our daily life 
is one continuous round of credence. Indeed, if it 
were not for the credulous principle within us, we 
should grow up as ignorant and barbarous as 



THE STILL, SMALL VOICE. 497 

savages. You believe the world to be a huge ball, 
Ben ; but you believe this only because people 
tell you so, and despite the testimony of your own 
eyes, which assure you that it is merely an 
enormous plate of land and water. You believe 
that there are shores across the sea, even though 
you see none, and see, too, that the water itself 
ends at the horizon ; and you believe this simply 
because your father and I tell you that we came 
thence ; and yet when poor Columbus reasoned 
with the bigoted potentates of Spain and Portugal, 
they laughed such notions to scorn, and preferred 
the avouchment of their own eyesight to the 
demonstrations o£ his logic. You believe the 
million strange tales of history, and yet you 
could never have known one fact recorded there 
of your own cognizance, nor have even so much 
as set eyes upon the old chroniclers, nor. indeed, 
have ever spoken with any one who did. When, 
too, you come to study the discoveries and 
elaborations of physical science, you will find how 
heavily your faith has to be taxed, and that if 
you pause to test and prove for yourself each new 
truth as it startles your mind, you will find that 
you will advance no quicker than the tame 
elephant, which dreads a pitfall at every step, 
and will not move a foot till it has tiied with 
its trunk the solidity of each paving-stone it has 
to pass over. Indeed, lad, we are born credulous, 
even to superstition, and credulous we must be 
to the last, if we would hold the least communion 
with our fellows ; for it is only the silliness of 
scepticism that would have us believe all men 
liars till we have proved them truthful; even 
as it is the roguery of lawyers to make us think 
all men are rogues till we find them honest. 
Why, lad, if it were not for the abiding trust of 
faith, how could we have anv sense of the future ? 

2 k 



498 YOUNG BENJAMIN FKANKLIN. 

But as it is, the child lays its little head on the 
pillow, and gives itself up to the temporary death 
of sleep, confident in the new life of to-morrow. 
The philosopher and the boor see the gunpowder 
explode once, and instantly the boor and the 
philosopher, too, have faith that the wondrous 
powder will, under the same circumstances, con- 
tinue exploding for ever after. The farmer sows 
his grain in perfect faith that season will follow 
season as before, and husbands the crop in 
perfect faith that year will succeed year to the 
end of time. The swain writes to his absent 
lover in faith — in faith that the letter will reach 
the girl, even though it have to* travel thousands 
of miles before it gets to her hand — faith that the 
magic little ink-marks he traces on the paper 
before him, will whisper in her ear the \erj words 
he. wishes, and pour his heart out to her as he is 
then doing ; ay, and in faith too that she will kiss 
the letter as he kisses it, and that their lips will 
thus be joined again, even though miles of space 
lie between them. And further, to round the 
perfect circle of our faithful lives, the gray beard 
lays his head upon the pillow like the tired child, 
and gives himself up to the temporary sleep of 
death — confident in the new life of to-morrow." 

" Oh, isn't it pretty!" the little fellow ex- 
claimed. 

" Pretty, child !" echoed Uncle Ben ; " it is simply 
true ; and truth is always more or less beautiful. 
Indeed, Ben, doubt and mistrust enter the mind 
only through the hard lessons of experience. We 
have an innate tendency to believe — to believe 
in nature, and believe in man too ; even as all men 
have an innate propensity for truth-speaking and 
frankness, and this has to be checked and perverted 
before they can lie and deceive ; for the truth 
ever rises first to the lips, and falsity and secrecy 



THE STILL, SMALL VOICE. 499 

are merely the dishonest after-thoughts of the 
craven heart. Now it is this sense of the 
spontaneous truthfulness of human nature that 
gives rise to that spirit of trust in our fellow- 
creatures, which is one of the grandest and kind- 
liest characters of our soul. Again I say to you, 
boy, let your ear be ever stone-deaf to the base 
attorney-precept, which would have you believe 
all men rogues till you find them honest ; for, rest 
assured, trust between man and man is as neces- 
sary for the business and friendship of the world, 
as even faith in the uniformity of nature is for our 
continued physical existence. The entire machinery 
of commerce is trust and credit ; and even in what 
are called ready-money transactions, the same prin- 
ciples must have sway for a time ; for either the 
seller must part with his goods, or the buyer with 
his money, one before the other, unless they stand, 
the one holding and the other grasping the wares, 
while each does the same with the gold and 
silver, both relaxing their grip of their former 
possessions only at one and the same time. But 
when you come to look into the wondrous 
mechanism of the world's merchantry, lad, and 
see the all-pervading element of trustfulness 
which permeates the monetary affairs of all great 
nations, you will find how shiploads of treasure 
are consigned to utter strangers in remote count- 
ries, without deed or document from those to 
whom they are intrusted ; how dealings are daily 
made for thousands, and often millions, by mere 
word of mouth, without a line to vouch the bar- 
gain ; how a man's mere signature will pass 
current in the market as the representative of a 
mass of gold that no cart could carry ; and how 
a ' simple slip of printed tissue paper will go 
from hand to hand, and be changed for an infinity 
of goods, and yet none care to carry it to the bank, 

2 K 2 



500 YOUNG BENJAMIN FRANKLIN. 

and get the gold for it that it is believed to be 
convertible into." 

"I declare, uncle," interrupted the boy, " all 
this seems more wonderful to me than anything 
you have yet told me." 

1 ' Indeed, my lad, be assured that untrustfulness 
is the enormity, and not the rule of human life and 
conduct (otherwise the world could not go on as 
it does) ; be assured too, that the attorney-creed 
is the simple consequence of lawyers having to deal 
with the exceptional cases of breach of faith in 
society, rather than being witness to the innume- 
rable daily instances of the faithfulness and 
ordinary integrity of merchant life. For it is self- 
evident, that if, year after year, the bad debts in 
trade in the least exceeded the good ones, commerce 
itself must collapse after a time, and every atom of 
capital ultimately disappear from the land ; whilst, 
on the contrary, the growing riches of a country 
are ever a golden proof, not only that the principle 
of faith in nature has made men labour and hus- 
band still as before, but that the principle of trust 
in man has not been abused, and that more have 
turned out trustworthy than roguish." 

44 Indeed ! indeed, uncle !" the little fellow cried 
out, ' ' this is the most cheerful view of human 
nature that you have yet given me." 

" It is, my lad," responded the mentor ; " and all 
the world is cheerful, if we will look at it with 
but just a glimmer of daylight about it. And now, 
Ben, I come to you yourself," the old man said, 
solemnly; " you see what a grand and noble prin- 
ciple is this propensity to trust in man, so do you 
never do a thing to abuse it. Eemember, the man 
who trusts and believes you, honours you ; he pays 
you the finest and most elegant tacit compliment 
it is possible for one man to pay another. Let the 
truth then be ever on your lips — like the light of 



501 

the morning sun, gilding the crimson edges of the 
clouds; and spit the rising lie from your teeth, 
before your coward heart has time to shape it into 
words. Do you ever bear in mind that man's innate 
belief in the truthfulness of his fellow-man is so 
fine and generous a gift, that it has all the impress 
of the godhead's own righteousness upon it. Do 
you then ever see it as a sacred thing, and regard 
lies and equivocations as the very blasphemy of 
honour. Eemember, too, you damage not only 
your own integrity by falsity, but you undermine 
a man's trustfulness, and so make him doubt 
and suspect others." 

The boy again began to scribble round the draw- 
ing ; and when he had finished, the uncle once 
more proceeded with the exhortation. 

"Be just and righteous to the man, too, who 
makes you his trustee — no matter upon how small 
a business. Break faith with none ; for remember 
the one who trusts you is himself trusted by others, 
and if you fail to keep your bond with him, you 
make it hard for him to meet his engagements with 
those to whom he himself stands pledged. Com- 
merce, Ben, is the broad arch overspanning every 
city and country, with nGthing but the honour of 
men for the keystone to bind the whole together ; 
and with each atom of the structure bearing upon, 
and not only sustained by but sustaining the others. 
Moreover, I say, be not only strictly just, but 
have you ever the generosity to be fair in all your 
dealings. Justice is but negative virtue, doing 
no man wrong ; but, I say to you, be more than 
negatively virtuous ; be positively righteous enough 
to be liberal, rather than mean and grasping in 
your transactions ; and prefer to give an advan- 
tage to the man with whom you deal, instead of 
taking advantage of him. So when the scales of 
equity are trembling with the exactness of the 



502 YOUNG BENJAMIN FRANKLIN. 

equipoise, do you be the one to throw in the market 
handful, that shall change the rigid straitness and 
squareness of the arrangement into the grace of 
the well turned balance." 

Again the lad fell to scribbling the moral 
memoranda on the margin of the paper before 
him, and when he had finished he looked up as 
usual in the old man's face, and said " Yes, uncle ! 
I am listening." 

" Moreover, Ben," then went on the good coun~ 
sellor, "as you wish to be trusted yourself, and 
feel how galling it is to be doubted and suspected, 
be it your rule ever to put your trust in others ; 
and let not the exceptional rogues and cheats of 
the world ever beat out of you your faith in the 
general trustworthiness of your fellows. A bum- 
bailiff believes every man to be a swindler ; but 
do you have a soul above the catchpoll's, and 
think well and kindly of men — as you yourself 
would be well and kindly thought of. Eemember 
how difficult it is in the tangled yarn of human 
motives to pick out the very ' cue to action,' and 
that the parsimony, which is wise husbandry in 
a prudent man, is but base avarice in the miser ; 
the punishment, which is kindly chastenment from 
the hands of the wise governor, is simply bloody 
malevolence when the blow is prompted by revenge. 
Be you, therefore, the one ever to translate the 
passages in a man's life freely rather than 
crabbedly ; and to choose the finer spiritual ren- 
dering, in preference to the harsh literal construc- 
tion of the act. Be slow to suspect, for an eager- 
ness to believe in meanness is but the mean 
prompting of a mean nature ; and have faith in 
no man's baseness till the creed is fairly forced 
upon you : but when you find your old friend out, 
why, then fling the dog from you, as you would 
a fawning hound with dirty paws. Moreover, I 



THE STILL, SMALL YOICE. 503 

say to yon, trust even the untrustworthy, so long- 
as they remain true to yourself; for if one breach 
of faith with another is to put an end to all 
faith in us, how can the fallen ever hope to rise ? 
Be assured, too, that by trusting those who have 
broken trust, the chances are you so rouse in 
them the dormant sense of honour, that even they 
will scorn to abuse the generosity that gave them 
credit for a virtue which others supposed to be 
dead in them. Therefore, I tell you, lad, lend 
your money as I have done to the starving thief, 
in the face of the whole world ; and let the 
whole world see that even he — if you pique his 
honour — can render you every farthing of your 
due. To give others credit for being as honour- 
able as yourself, till you find them dishonour- 
able, is not only to be a gentleman, but to create 
gentlemen. It is to raise men to a dignity that 
the monarch himself cannot confer ; for though 
a king may make a man a lord, he cannot make 
a man a gentleman; for that is the Almighty's 
own peerage, over which none can take pre- 
cedence." 

More notes were made, and there was the same 
silence as before during the pause, for little Ben 
could do no more than listen, record, and ponder. 
The theme, he well knew, was far beyond his 
powers to grapple with ; so, like a wise little 
fellow as he was, he became a good listener in- 
stead of being only an indifferent talker. 

" And now, my son," presently resumed Uncle 
Ben, " there remains but the small matter of 
pride and humility to glance at, and then our 
task is done." 

The only remark the boy hazarded, was " You 
said that we felt proud when we compared our 
conduct, our gifts, our possessions, our station in 
life with that of others, and fancied ourselves 



504 YOUNG BENJAMIN FRANKLIN. 

better than they for what we do or have — that's 
what you said, uncle." 

"I know, lad," smiled the godfather; "pride 
always conies of one of those human comparisons 
that are truly said to be odious. Even when the 
pride is just, we merely put ourselves in the scales 
against a heap of rags and bones, and find a small 
delight in seeing the human refuse kick the beam ; 
but in false pride it is a mere bubble that we strive 
to give gravity to. As well might the peacock's 
feather itself be proud that it no longer trails in 
the dirt, as the upstart fool of a mandarin who 
wears it. But to my mind, boy, it is the light 
weights after all that win the race ; for the humble 
are ever the wise. The humble man flings him- 
self upon his knees, and looks upward, in very 
worship of the greatness and the goodness he 
loves to contemplate ; the proud man, on the 
other hand, draws himself up, and looks down, in 
scorn of the baseness and the littleness he de- 
lights to contrast with himself: the one gets a 
reflected grace from the glory he is for ever re- 
garding, the other a smudge of the soot from the 
sweeps with whom he is continually measuring 
lengths. Besides, pride is merely the coxcomb 
crest, as I said before, of the poor mumming 
fool in the masque. For what has the proudest 
of us to be proud of? Is it your person, man? 
why that is merely the showy binding which is 
ever relied on as a means of fudging off a trum- 
pery book. Is it your clothes ? why, the tailor's 
dummy might as well lord it over the scarecrow. 
Is it the strawberry-leaves of your grace? but 
what are the mere leaves of honour without the 
fruit? Is it your learning? what is it but the 
chattering of the Greek alphabet after all ? Is it 
your wisdom? what are you, Mr. Philosopher, 
but the monkey hammering away to get at the 



THE STILL, SMALL VOICE. 505 

ticking of tlie watch. ? Is it your art ? a grass- 
hopper might as well be proud of the power in 
its hinder legs, as the artisf of his handicraft. 
Is it jour goodness ? pshaw ! had you any of the 
true stuff about you, pride could not enter your 
heart, seeing that you are no better than the idiot 
— the mere creature of the great inscrutable will." 

The task was now fairly ended ; for though 
there were still the feelings of anger and gratitude, 
belonging to the class, Uncle Ben had already 
spoken of these while treating of the affectionate 
emotions ; so that he merely pointed out to the 
boy, that the grateful impression which preceded 
the feeling of love is more a sense of delight than 
gratitude, and that the impulse of thankfulness 
is strongly felt only when we are convinced that 
the good done us is a voluntary act of grace con- 
ferred upon us, and that merely with the view of 
doing us the good. 

The third and last class of sentiments, viz., 
those which are engendered in us by others' opinion 
of ourselves, the uncle merely particularized, with- 
out entering into the details of each distinct feel- 
ing ; saying that the pleasures we derive from 
this group of sentiments consist of the delight we 
feel in being loved by others, or in being admired 
by them, as well as in being pitied, respected, 
honoured, revered, and approved by them; whilst, 
on the other hand, he said it was possible, under 
certain conditions of mind, for man to find a 
perverse enjoyment in being hated, despised, con- 
temned, and even persecuted by his fellows. In- 
deed, after all he had propounded about the love 
of approbation — which he told the boy was the one 
feeling underlying almost the whole of the class — 
it was idle for him to expand the subject into 
tediousness. 



506 YOUNG BENJAMIN FRANKLIN. 

So he concluded by simply informing his little 
godson, that the love of the approbation of others 
is the main element in what is called vanity; 
even as the love of our own approbation is the 
ruling principle in what is termed pride. Further, 
he said that the reason why praise is so agreeable 
to weak natures, is because it serves to increase 
people's faith in their own powers, and this is 
necessary for their very existence ; so that where 
this self-faith is the feeblest, (because the powers 
are felt to be the weakest,) the desire for praise 
and admiration is always found to be the strong- 
est. Hence, the love of approbation, he added, is 
the distinctive mark of modesty and diffidence, 
and is as pardonable, and even beautiful to 
behold — when not made an all-absorbing passion 
— in the feminine character, as it is a sign of 
effeminacy and foppery in the masculine mind. 



CHAPTEE XXV. 

THE BURDEN OF THE SONG. 

Uncle Ben's evening meal did not take long to 
discuss. The bowl of milk was soon emptied, and 
the hot, buttered corn-cake that Dame Franklin 
had sent up with it was rapidly made away with ; 
for the old man was anxious to get the lesson 
ended that night. So when the boy had removed 
the basins, and swept the crumbs from the table, 
another log was thrown across the dogs on the 
hearth, and the little room made to flicker again 
with the ruddy flames, in the dusk of the " 'tween- 
lights." 

The old man drew his chair round close to 
the fire, and sat watching the burning fagots, 



THE BURDEN OF THE SONG. 507 

as he proceeded to put the finishing touch to 
the view of life he had sketched out for his little 
pupil. 

Little Ben placed himself on the hassock at his 
uncle's feet, and said, as he laid the old man's 
veiny hand in his own little palm, and kept trying 
to smooth the wrinkles out of the back of it, "I 
know what you're going to tell me now, unky 
dear. You're going to point out to me what is 
my duty to those poor boys we saw in the poor- 
house and the jail ; ain't you now ?" 

The godfather shook his head, and replied : 
"Not so, my boy; they are only a mere fraction 
of the mass to whom we owe a duty. I might, 
had I cared to harass your little soul into good- 
ness, have taken you to the madhouse, and shown 
you the host of pauper lunatics and idiots there ; 
or I might have led you to the quarter of the town 
where the blind beggars mostly live, and have let 
you see them with their blind wives (for the 
blind mostly marry the blind), sitting in their 
clean and tidy homes, without a candle, in the 
dark — and have let you hear them tell their blind 
dreams and stories of the death of the faithful 
dogs that they still love well enough to weep 
over. I might have shown you how, even they, 
beggars as they are, seldom or never shut the door 
against the beggar who is worse off than them- 
selves ; and how, though they have hearts full of 
pity for suffering, they are still callous enough to 
relish, with all a true beggar's zest — any roguish 
cheat of mendicancy. I could have taken you 
likewise, lad, to the crippled and the maimed, 
and have brought you face to face with the half- 
beggar hucksters of the town, that pretend to sell 
some petty wares about the city, so as to avoid the 
imprisonment of the jail, as regular mendicants on 
the one hand, or of the poorhouse, as in-doors 



508 YOUNG BENJAMIN FRANKLIN. 

people on the other. I might have shown you, 
too, the petty markets frequented by the very old, 
and very young, for trades that require but a few 
halfpence as capital to start in ; I might have let 
you see these poor, struggling, half-starved things, 
shivering at early morning in their rags, and 
might have let you hear how even they — mer- 
chants who are literally not worth twopence — are 
trusted, ay, and seldom or never break faith with 
their creditors either. And when you had read 
the sorry leaf out of life's book, from beginning to 
end, I might have whispered in your ear, Ben, 
that these were not the voluntary beggars of 
the world — not the professional mendicant-cheats 
that prefer lying and louting to honest labour — 
but God Almighty's own beggars — the blind, the 
crippled, and the infirm." 

"I wish you had taken me to see all this, 
uncle," broke in the little fellow, as he still fondled 
with the old man's hand. 

" Nevertheless, Ben, this is not the rule of want," 
went on the other ; " it is good to know that such 
misery exists about us, so that we may have a 
sense of the favours vouchsafed to ourselves — even 
if we have no desire to relieve the suffering. 
But there is little good in the knowledge, as a 
matter of wisdom ; for the study of exceptional 
cases gives the mind but a sorry understanding 
after all. What I do want to wake you up to, how- 
ever, is the law of human suffering, lad ; and the 
reason why I took you to the poor-house and the 
jail, was merely to shake you well, and rouse you 
to listen to the tale I had to tell." 

" The law of human suffering !" echoed the boy. 

"Yes, the law!" reiterated the teacher, " for it 
is the rule of life, that more are born to want and 
suffer than to feast and be merry, Ben." 

"Well, but, uncle!" remonstrated the little 



THE BURDEN OF THE SONG, 509 

fellow, " I'm sure I don't see so many poor people 
about as you'd make out." 

4 'How should you, lad, when the truly honest 
and deserving poor are always the secret sufferers, 
and not the ostentatious beggars that love to parade 
the afflictions on which they trade ?" was the gentle 
rebuke. " Besides, you are born in the sphere of 
comparative comfort and competence, Ben; and 
such is the caste of class-life among us, that the 
people belonging to one division of society have 
no more knowledge of the people in another grade 
— even though they live continually about them — 
than they have of the inhabitants of the remotest 
countries. Hence, the well-to-do, having no com- 
munion with the hard-to-do, are naturally sceptical 
when they are told that their happiness and ease 
is the anomaly in life, and that suffering and 
trouble are the normal lot of humanity. Now 
look here, little man : in every state, as nearly 
as possible two thirds of the population are born 
to a life of hard labour, and live continually, as it 
is called, ' from hand to mouth ;' so that, as almost 
all trades have their brisk and their slack seasons, 
and many a calling depends on the very elements 
themselves for the pursuit of it, you can readily 
. understand, that the mass of the people must have 
regularly-recurring periods of bitter privation to 
pass through every year of their lives. Think, for 
one moment, of the immense host of stomachs that 
depend on the very soil itself for their bread — the 
multitudinous body of ground-labourers (includ- 
ing the great agricultural troop), and the miners, 
road-makers, and excavators, that are more or less 
required in all nations. Think, too, of the im- 
mense army of carriers, carters, and porters, barge- 
men, and boatmen, merchant-seamen, and dock- 
labourers, coachmen, stablemen, and messengers ; 
why these, lad, generally make up two fifths of the 



510 YOUNG BENJAMIN FRANKLIN. 

entire body of grown men in every civilized com- 
munity ; and upon the labour and health of these, 
some thousands, if not millions of families are de- 
pendent. Think then of the brutal ignorance in 
■which this tremendous crowd of people are left to 
wallow, generation after generation; and next, 
think of their comfortless homes and their aching 
limbs after a heavy day's labour (you have never 
done one yet, my boy), and then you will be able 
to make some allowance for the attraction they find 
in the stimulus and cheering fire and company of 
the taproom. And when you have made this 
allowance, and seen that thrift and providence, 
under such circumstances, are moral impossibili- 
ties, you will be able to have some faint idea of 
what kind of a season winter must be to such 
people, and to their wives and children : winter, 
when there is always less to do and get, and more 
wanted. Why, if we can feel for the birds of the 
air, and the robins, when the snow is on the 
ground, surely the heart cannot be utterly 
steeled against the thousands of little half- 
feathered human birds — such as the children of 
the ground- workers — that suffer, when the earth is 
like a block of marble with the frost, as much as, if 
not more than the robins themselves at such times. 
" The skilled labourers again," the uncle re- 
sumed, " such as the tailors, the shoemakers, the 
weavers, and the vast body of metal-workers, and 
wood- workers, as well as the builders of every 
community, are a multitude that are becoming 
almost as large as the tribe of unskilled workmen 
themselves ; and in many of these trades there are 
the same periodical fluctuations, as in those that 
depend upon the seasons and the earth for the 
subsistence of the people belonging to them. So 
that when I tell you that as many as two thirds 
of the people in most countries are wagemen, 



THE BURDEN" OF THE SONG. 511 

living generally from hand to mouth, and that a 
very large majority of them are hardly a half- 
gallon loaf beyond starvation, you will understand 
that I do not speak at random, and that want and 
suffering is the rule of life, and comfort and happiness 
only the exception"* 

" Oh, uncle !" exclaimed young Ben, " how can 

* The numbers and proportions of the different classes of 
society in our own country at the time of taking the last 
census, were as follows : — 

Total population of Great Britain in 1851 (in round num- 
bers), twenty-one millions. 

But of these not quite half were children and young- 
people under twenty years of age, the majority of whom were 
incapable of earning their own living ; the returns being — 
4,765,000 males in Great Britain under twenty years of age 
4,735,000 females „ „ „ „ 



9,500,000 of young people of both sexes. 

Whilst, on the other hand, out of the eleven and a half 
millions of grown people, rather more than half were women ; 
the majority of whom also were incapable of supporting 
themselves : the returns being (in round numbers) : — 

5,500,000 males in Great Britain above twenty years of age 

6,000,000 females 



11,500,000 of grown people of both sexes. 

So that out of a gross population of just upon twentj^one 
millions, but little more than a quarter, or five and a half 
millions, were grown men, upon whom the support of the 
other three-fourths of the community more or less depended. 

Now these five and a half millions of grown men throughout 
Great Britain were thus distributed as to their occupations : — 

In the first place there was upwards of one million of 
agricultural labourers, shepherds, drovers, farm servants, 
woodmen, and men employed about gardens, and the like. 

And besides these there was upwards of a quarter of a 
million of general labourers ; such as groundworkers, navi- 
gators, railway labourers, road men, coal-heavers, and so 
forth. 

Then there was more than a quarter of a million of miners 
and quarrymen ; and upwards of another quarter of a million 
of carriers and carters, railway men, and omnibus drivers, 
coachmen, grooms and stable men, boatmen and bargemen, 



b\2 YOUNG BENJAMIN FRANKLIN. 

you tell me such things after the fine, pleasant 
views of the world yon have given me ? But why 



canal service men, and merchant seamen, messengers and 
porter?, warehousemen and packers, and others engaged in 
the conveyance of goods or persons from one part of the 
country to another. 

Hence there was an aggregate of very nearly two millions 
(one million nine hundred and fifty thousand) of unskilled 
labourers among the five and a half millions of men through- 
out Great Britain ; or in other words, more than a third of 
the grown male population of the country existed in the semi- 
brute state of mere " hewers of wood, and drawers of water." 

The remaining three and a half millions of men in Great 
Britain were thus occupied. First, there were more than two 
millions of artisans, or skilled labourers, following callings 
that required more or less of an apprenticeship before they 
could be profitably pursued ; and these were made up of 
more than a quarter of a million of builders (such as brick- 
layers, slaters, masons and plasterers, &c.) : upwards of a 
third of a million of wood-workers (such as carpenters and 
joiners, cabinet makers, and carvers and gilders, musical in- 
strument makers, chair and box makers, turners, frame 
makers, block and print cutters, clog makers, coopers, ship- 
wrights, coachmakers, wheelwrights, sawyers, basket makers, 
lath makers, cork cutters, &c.) ; upwards of another third of 
a million of textile manufacturers (including the cotton- 
factory workers, and the several working manufacturers of 
woollen cloths, worsted and stuff materials, carpets, silk and 
ribbon, flax and linen, fustian, rope, sail-cloth and lace, as 
well as the printers and dyers of calico) ; and one hundred 
and twenty-five thousand workers on textile materials (such 
as the great body of tailors, umbrella makers, hatters, &c.) ; 
upwards of a quarter of a million, too, of leather workers 
(such as curriers and tanners, saddlers, and whip and har- 
ness makers, glovers and shoemakers) ; more than a third of 
a million metal workers (such as iron manufacturers, black- 
smiths, locksmiths, gunsmiths, farriers, anchor smiths, boiler 
makers, file cutters, nail makers, needle makers, engine 
and machine makers, tool makers, millwrights, implement 
makers, wire workers, braziers, button makers, coppersmiths, 
whitesmiths, tinmen, zinc workers, platers, goldsmiths and 
silversmiths, watchmakers and' philosophical instrument 
makers) ; nearly one hundred thousand workers in clay, 
stone, and glass (such as the brick makers, potters, and 
earthenware manufacturers, pipe makers, and glass manu- 



THE BURDEN OB 1 THE SOXG. 513 

should all this want and suffering be, if God is as 
good and kind as you say He is ?" 



faeturers). Nearly nineteen thousand workers in bone and 
hair (such as the comb-makers, brush and broom makers, 
horse-hair workers, and hair-dressers, and wig-makers) ; 
twenty-five thousand and odd printers and paper workers, 
(such as compositors, pressmen, paper stainers, bookbinders, 
and paper hangers) ; nearly fifty thousand chemical manu- 
facturers (such as the manufacturers of acids, artificial 
manures, cements, inks, colours, disinfectants, varnishes, 
medicines, &c, as well as the dyers and fullers, soap boilers, 
and tallow chandlers, provision curers, french polishers, gas 
manufacturers, paper makers, patent firewood and lucifer 
match manufacturers, firework makers, &c.) ; besides, there 
were upwards of two hundred thousand of workers at provi- 
sions (such as bakers, confectioners and millers, butchers, 
maltsters and brewers, fishermen, and even milkmen). Then 
add to these ten thousand general mechanics (branch not 
mentioned), and we shall have an aggregate of two millions 
and sixty odd thousand of skilled workmen above twenty 
years of age in Great Britain. Moreover, there were up- 
wards of one hundred thousand clerks and officials through- 
out the country (including government clerks, law clerks, 
commercial clerks, parish clerks, as well as the toll collectors 
and commercial travellers, besides the various parish and 
church officers, and those attached to the different charitable 
institutions and law courts) ; there were also nearly another 
hundred thousand gentlemen's servants, and nearly the same 
number (ninety-two thousand) of guardians of the public 
peace (such as policemen, soldiers and pensioners, sailors in 
the navy, and marines) ; and lastly, there were nearly twenty 
thousand itinerant traders (such as showmen, and men with 
games and sports, hawkers and pedlars), together with not 
quite forty thousand males above twenty years of age, 
belonging to the helpless and dependent class (such as 
paupers, vagrants, alms-people, beggars, lunatics, and those 
living on their relatives). 

Now, putting the whole of these several classes of skilled 
and unskilled labourers, clerks and officials, policemen and 
common soldiers and seamen, as well as the servants, itinerant 
traders, and dependents all together, so as to form one body, 
we have a total of four millions three hundred and sixty odd 
thousand of grown men (with families generally), who, if 
they are not all strictly wage-men, at least mostly live like 
them from hand to mouth upon their immediate earnings, and 

2 L 



514 YOUNG BENJAMIN FRANKLIN. 

" Why should hunger, which is one of the chief 
evils of a life of poverty, be a pain, lad ?" was the 



whose earnings, moreover, seldom exceed one hundred a 
year, often fall below fifty, and in a large number of cases 
hardly ever rise above ten shillings per week. Four millions 
three hundred and sixty odd thousand of grown men, living 
more or less from hand to mouth — the majority of whom are 
seldom half-a-quartern loaf beyond starving — and that out of 
only five and a half millions of grown men altogether ! so 
that if Uncle Ben had said that three-fourths of the people 
in most communities are born to want and suffer, the state- 
ment would have been more correct. 

It may be useful to the young reader to know what 
classes constitute the more lucky portion of the community 
— that portion which is either so well paid for the services 
rendered by them, as to enable them to live like gentlemen, 
or who are engaged in trade or commerce, or else living on 
their means as independent people. 

Well, imprimis, there are sixty-seven thousand men be- 
longing to what are styled the learned professions : thirty 
thousand clergymen and priests, seventeen thousand law- 
yers, and twenty thousand doctors. Then there are four- 
teen thousand officers belonging to the army, navy, or East 
India service, on either full or half pay. 

Moreover, there are another sixty-seven thousand grown 
men belonging to the literary and artistic classes (such as 
authors, editors, scientific "professors," teachers, school- 
masters, music masters, and others; musicians, actors, 
artists, engravers, carvers, pattern designers, draughtsmen, 
medallists and die sinkers, architects, surveyors, and civil 
engineers). 

Further, there are upwards of a hundred thousand con- 
nected with the moneyed or capitalist classes, as well as what 
may be styled the "commission" business of commerce 
(such as those who are returned as independent and annui- 
tants) — of whom there are about thirty-three thousand in 
the last decennial report — and not quite twenty thousand 
landed proprietors, as well as twelve thousand house pro- 
prietors throughout Great Britain. Then there are two 
thousand shipowners ; not quite two thousand bankers, and 
nine thousand merchants; besides a host of ship agents, 
brokers, agents and factors, salesmen, auctioneers, account- 
ants, pawnbrokers, general merchants and dealers, as well 
as coach and cab owners : in all, one hundred and fifteen 
thousand people. 



THE BURDEN OF THE SONG. 515 

interrogatory in reply. " Why, because, as I told 
you before, if it had been made a pleasure, we 



Next, there are upwards of a third of a million farmers 
and graziers throughout the country. 

After these come the tradesmen and dealers, of whom 
there are altogether as many as three hundred and seventy- 
eight thousand, including thirteen thousand general " shop- 
keepers," five thousand and odd cattle and sheep dealers^ 
three hundred horse dealers, twenty odd thousand inn- 
keepers, twelve hundred livery stable keepers, six thousand 
hoard and lodging-house keepers, thirty-seven thousand 
licensed victuallers and beer-shop keepers ; nearly nine 
thousand wine and spirit merchants, eight thousand corn 
merchants and flour dealers, nearly the same niunber of 
greengrocers, three thousand cheesemongers, not quite two 
thousand poulterers, and six thousand seven hundred fish- 
mongers ; as many as fifty-five thousand five hundred 
grocers, and three thousand tobacconists ; and about twenty- 
two thousand others dealing in vegetable or animal food, 
or else in drinks and stimulants ; fifteen hundred " water 
providers " the same number of dealers in salt, and only as 
many oil and colounnen, besides two thousand others dealing 
in oils and gums ; eleven thousand and odd druggists, over 
ten thousand coal merchants and dealers ; nearly nine thou- 
sand dealing in wool, and three thousand woollen drapers ; 
six thousand clothiers, and three thousand hosiers ; nearly 
twenty eight thousand linen drapers; about five thousand 
dealing in silk, as silk mercers, &c., and thirteen thousand 
others engaged in furnishing articles of dress ; five thousand 
and odd dealing in hemp, and eighteen thousand in flax ; 
sixteen hundred fellmongers, three thousand grease and 
bone dealers, and only five hundred and sixty dealing in 
feathers and quills ; three thousand five hundred sta- 
tioners, and two thousand and more dealing in paper; six 
thousand five hundred publishers and booksellers ; six thou- 
sand 'four hundred people dealing in timber, three thousand 
five hundred in glass and earthenware, and six hundred in 
precious stones ; besides whom there are the dealers in the 
different metals, or metal goods — as three hundred and 
twenty in copper, five thousand in tin, two thousand in 
lead, thirty in zinc, six thousand and more in the mixed 
metals, and about twenty-five thousand in iron and steel ; in- 
cluding nearly seven thousand ironmongers. 

Now add to the numbers of the above-mentioned classes 
twenty odd thousand men above twenty years of age, re- 

* 2 l 2 



516 YOUNG BENJAMIN FRANKLIN. 

should have sat still and should have starved with 
delight. Even so with human misery : if all were 
well-to-do — if there were no sickness and no suffer- 
ing in the world, there would be no need of sym- 
pathy, nothing to be grateful for, no reason for 
human love. If man wanted nothing at the hands 
of his parents or his neighbour, if he were able to 
shift for himself directly he came into existence, as 
readily as the young grub, why he would have no 
more love than a grub, no more affection and 
gratitude than a house-fly. But, as it is, this sense 



turned as sons and scholars, and nearly fifty-five thou- 
sand others " of no stated occupation," and we have a gross 
total of one million and eighty-six thousand grown men in 
positions of comparative comfort, against four million three 
hundred and sixty odd thousand in comparative indigence. 
Or, assuming each of these men to be married, and have two 
children respectively, we shall, if we multiply these totals 
by four, come to something like an approximate notion as to 
how many of our twenty-one millions of people enjoy lives 
of ease and plenty, and how many live lives of care, if not 
distress. The result shows that the proportions are four 
millions of well-to-do folk and seventeen millions of strug- 
gling poor in the country. 

A brief summary of the whole is subjoined. 

Number of men above twenty yeabs oe age, belonging to 
the wage class, and othebs living fbom hand to mouth 
in Great Britain, calculated from the census of 
1851. 
Labourers (agricultural and general, as well as] 

those engaged in mining and the carrying > 1 , 944 , 300 

trades) J 

Artisans 2,061,400 

Clerks and officials . 112,350 

Gentlemen's servants 96,150 

Policemen, and common soldiers, and seamen 92 , 000 

Showmen and hucksters 18,300 

Dependents (including paupers, vagrants,] 

alms-people, beggars, and living on rela-i 38,000 
tives) ) 

4,362,500 



THE BURDEX OF THE SONG. 517 

of sympathy has been made one of the most tender 
and graceful emotions of our nature, being a double 
blessing — blessing him that gives, as Shakes- 
pere says, and him that receives as well : and rest 
assured it was for the development of this, the 
finest feeling of our soul, that some have been 
born to want and suffering, and some, on the other 
hand, endowed with the power to commiserate and 
relieve." 



Number of men above twenty yeaes of age, belonging to 
the moneyed and capitalist classes, as well as to 
the professional, artistic, and trading classes in 
Great Britain, calculated from the census of 1851. 

lOlitary, naval , and East India officers (on full ) -, ± aC] A 

and half pay) J 14 ' UUU 

Professional men 67,900 

Literary and artistic men 67,000 

Moneyed classes, capitalists, merchants, and) -.-,- ^-^ 

commission agents ) 

Farmers and graziers 367,000 

Tradesmen and dealers 378,710 

Sons and scholars belonging to wealthier I «i 7755 

classes j ~' 

Of no stated occupation ........ 54,800 

1,086,760 

Total number of males above twenty years of [ ^ ,^o g-t * 
age in Great Britain j ' ' 

Total number accounted for in the classes"! ? ,<q 9 oq 
above given . J ' J ^ ' 

Unaccounted for 9,555 

It is impossible to give the returns exactly on this subject, 
owing to the confounding of the employers with the em- 
ployed in the last census returns ; as well as owing to the 
disgracefully imbecile manner in which the various occupa- 
tions of society are classified in the government report — the 
logical arrangement being such as would shame a schoolboy. 
For on account of an insane attempt at what is styled a 
" subjective " classification of the people, we have the woollen 



518 YOUNG BENJAMIN FRANKLIN. 

" T see now what it all means, uncle ; and that 
is the reason, I suppose, why we are told that 
from those to whom much is given much is ex- 
pected?" 

"Be it then your aim, lad, to do your duty in 
that state of life in which it has pleased God to 
call you," was the simple reply. 

There was a slight pause, and then the uncle, 
reverting to the starting-point of the long dis- 
course, asked once more the following question : — 



and silk manufacturers there grouped under the same head as 
the cow-keepers and the fishmongers, the soap boilers and 
tallow-chandlers, fellmongers and tanners, merely because 
they are all engaged upon animal matters ; so again we have 
in the last census report, the cabinet makers and timber mer- 
chants grouped with the greengrocer and confectioner, and 
the cotton and lace manufacturers lumped with, the oil and 
colourmen and brewers ; the paper makers and cork cutters 
classed with the grocers and tobacconists, and all for the 
extremely simple reason that they are every one employed 
upon vegetable matters ; even as the chimney-sweeps go with 
the coal miners and the glass manufacturers, the coal- 
heavers with the workers in precious stones, the road 
labourer with the goldsmith and silversmith, and the 
brick-maker with the blacksmith, solely because they are 
one and all employed upon minerals. Then we have the 
carpenter and joiner classed with the actor, engraver, and 
musician ; the bricklayer and pavior with the civil engineer, 
under the miscellaneous head of those engaged upon art 
and mechanics; though the turners and block and print 
cutters are lumped with the bakers and the brewers under 
the head vegetable workers, even as the carvers and gilders 
and electro-platers are classified with the railway navigators 
under the mineral order. As well might the arrangement 
have been according to the four elements, viz. : those with 
fire ; those working upon or under the earth ; those working 
with air or gases ; and those working with or upon the 
water, as have adopted the childish plan of those working 
with animal matters, vegetable matters, and minerals. In- 
deed, the classification of the people given in the last census 
is the very fatuity of system-mongering, compared with which 
the crudity of an alphabetical arrangement is the height of 
enlightenment. 



THE- BURDEN OF THE SONG. 519 

" And now do you know how to spend your 
money when you've go it, Ben?" 

" Oh, yes ; I know what I shall do with mine," 
cried the little fellow, jumping up from his stool, 
and shaking his head as he paced the room with 
the excitement of the thought. 

" What?" quietly inquired his godfather. 

" Why, I shall give it all away to the poor," 
was the earnest answer." 

"Trash, Ben! trash! and mere boyish senti- 
ment," rejoined the mentor. " This is the same 
as the old monkish folly — the folly of ascetic 
bigots, who thought the world a thing to fly from, 
and who gave up their riches to the church, ay ! 
and made a legion of beggars in return. Now I 
tell you, lad, beware of the cant of charitable 
donations ; and rely more on helping, comforting, 
and assuaging, than giving. Be assured that you 
do no good in making a beggar of a man, and 
leading him to believe in the chance half-guineas 
got out of charity, rather than in the certain 
weekly income to be gained by industry. Be 
assured that the kindliest act you can do even to 
a born beggar, is not to give, but to teach him to 
be self-reliant by developing in him the means to 
earn. So I say to you, give only where it would 
be a mockery to offer to lend ; namely, to God's 
own poor — the blind, the crippled, the idiot, and 
the infirm. But with the honest poor, be ever suffi- 
ciently respectful of their independence and their 
misery (for suffering should at least meet with this 
from us) to treat them as honest, independent men, 
and aid and assist them in their trouble and want, 
with any advance you can — but remember they 
are not beggars, but workmen, and therefore with- 
hold the beggar's dole. Still, in all you do, lad, 
ever bear in mind that giving is merely charity 
made easy to the rich. It costs so little toigive and 



520 YOUNG BENJAMIN FRANKLIN. 

depart ; and requires such a deal more self-denial 
to stay and tend, that those who believe in the 
all-sufficient power of money, believe also in the 
charity of the pocket rather than the heart. But 
do you believe, lad, there is a benevolence beyond 
gifts— the benevolence of wishing to see the needy 
and the suffering grow thrifty and sober, cleanly 
and courteous ; of wishing to see them find pleasure 
in the more graceful and refined enjoyments of 
our nature ; of wishing to see them alive to the 
beauties of the world about them, as well as the 
graces and dignities of life and action ; to see them 
well-housed, and justly dealt by, and kindly 
treated ; and not only does true benevolence wish 
to see all this compassed, but it strives its best 
to promote the end. This well-wishing and 
generous striving are often more genuinely chari- 
table than even liberality in giving. Nevertheless, 
where there is an urgent necessity for pecuniary 
relief, I say to you, let no base love of your money 
stand between you and your duty; for if you 
have been lucky enough to escape the common 
lot of want and pain, you should at least be 
grateful enough for the favour that has been 
shown to you, to share a little of the bounty with 
those whom God has left unprovided for, and left 
them unprovided for, too, solely that you and 
they might know the sweet friendship of befriend- 
ment," 

" But, uncle, why shouldn't I give all my 
money away to the poor if I please ?" asked the 
lad, who didn't half like the rebuff he had met 
with. 

iC Why, boy, because there is a scale of heinous- 
ness in crime, that tells us there is a scale of dut3 r 
in virtue also," Uncle Benjamin made answer. 
"Parricide is felt to be the greatest atrocity of 
which human nature can be guilty, and we know 



THE BURDEN OF THE SOXG. 521 

that it is so, simply because we know and feel that 
it violates the highest of all social ties — the tie 
between child and parent. Hence the first duties 
we have to fulfil are the home ones, Ben ; and when 
you have done all that love could wish or want 
for those of your household, why then pass on to 
your friends, and do all the duty of your love to 
them ; and after that widen the circle of your 
loving-kindness, aBC ^ do what is due to those that 
want and suffer in your own neighbourhood. 
And when this is done, if your heart have any 
surplus love left, why then extend your charity 
to your whole country — but beware, lad, be- 
ware — " 

The boy waited eagerly for the conclusion of the 
sentence, but (Jncle Benjamin remained silent, 
and merely shook his head and smiled at the little 
fellow. 

After a while the old man beckoned to the lad, 
and said, as he drew his godson to him, " Give 
me your ear, Ben. Beware of the cant of 
loving the whole world," he whispered. "Depend 
upon it, there is quite enough to do, if you do only 
half what you ought to your relatives, friends, and 
neighbours. Stick to the neighbour, lad ! stick to 
the neighbour ! :? 

" Love your neighbour as yourself," murmured 
the little fellow. 

44 Ay, boy, and depend upon it you'll find you 
have made a second self, and a better self, oiitside 
yourself, in so doing ; for true gratitude is more 
than equitable ; it gives back and adds an interest 
that never can be got by law. Bemember the 
w r isest man tells us — 

" ' The quality of mercy is not strain' d !' " 

added the godfather, as he laid his hand on his 
godchild's head — 



522 YOOTG BENJAMIN FRANKLIN. 

" ' It droppeth, as the gentle rain from heaven 
Upon the place beneath : it is twice bless' d ; 
It blesseth him that gives, and him that takes.' 

And this, Ben, is the burden of our song." 

The little fellow flung himself upon his knees 
on the hassock at the old man's feet, and burying 
his face in his lap, took up the words, and cried 
aloud in thankfulness for the creed, " ' It is twice 
blessed. It blesseth him that gives and him that 
takes. 5 " 

Presently Uncle Ben added, "And now the 
lesson of life is ended, and this the moral of all our 
teaching: — labour thriftfully at your business, 
boy, have graceful amusements, and do your duty." 



CHAPTEE XXVI. 

THE START IN LIFE. 



A week elapsed, and Uncle Ben was sitting up 
late in his own room transcribing into his volumes 
of manuscript sermons, the short-hand notes of 
the last important discourse he had heard, when 
suddenly his little godson bounced into the room 
shouting, 

" Oh, uncle, I've chosen a trade at last. What 
do you think it is ? Xow just you guess." 

The old man shook his head as much as to say 
the task was hopeless. 

"Father's been so kind, you can't tell," the 
boy rattled on, for he was too elated with his 
new prospects to be other than loquacious. u He's 
taken me round to see all the different kinds of 
businesses in the town, and I went with him a 
little way into the country too ; so that I might be 



THE START IN LIFE. 523 

iii a position, as he said, to choose fairly for myself.* 
Wasn't it good of him ? And he told me, do yon 
know, that he was quite pleased to find I had got 
such altered views of life ; though he said he 
didn't care much about your — what ever were the 
words he used ? — oh yes, your ' hoity-toity notions ' 
about the pleasures of poetry, and so on, you know, 
Still he was delighted when he found that I saw 
the * errors of pride and vanity, and that I could 
understand how necessary it was to be trustful in 
the world, and so on, uncle." 

The old man merely smiled in his turn at his 
brother's hard utilitarian theory of human enjoy- 
ment ; but the pair of them had too often discussed 
the question for Uncle Ben to be at all astonished 
at the ' hoity-toitiness ' that was ascribed to him. 

" Well, and what did you see, my little man?" 
asked the godfather, as he drew young Ben to his 
side, and curled his arm about the boy's waist. 

" Oh I saw ever such a lot of things, uncle — 
such a lot that I hardly know what I have seen, I 
declare," was the simple answer. "I never 
thought there was so much work going on in the 
world before. Let me see now, how did father 
begin? Oh, first he told me, as we went along, 
that the simplest form of labour is that of col- 
lecting the wealth that Nature produces of her 
own accord ; and this he said includes the work 
of the fisherman, the fowler, and the wild hunter, 
as well as that of the seaweed and manure collec- 
tors, the woodmen, and the wild flower gatherers, 
together with the pickers-up of shells and minerals 
along the sea-shore." 

" I know, Ben," nodded the uncle : " all which 
Master Josh got from me ; for it was only the 
other night I was telling him about it, after you had 

* A foot. 



524 YOUNG BENJAMIN FRANKLIN. 

gone to bed. Well, and after that, I suppose lie 
told yon, come the extractive processes of wealth- 
getting ?" 

" Certainly ; but first father said," added the 
youth, " that it would be needless for rne to go 
and see any of the work of collection, because such 
labour would be wholly unstated to me. And it was 
the same with the extraction of wealth from the 
earth, he told me ; for this includes the different 
forms of mining and quarrying ; though if I liked 
I might see a stone quarry, for father said he knew 
many a fine fellow engaged at that business." 

" Go on, Ben," still nodded the old man ; " and 
then followed all the different kinds of labour 
engaged in production ?" 

"Yes, uncle," answered the youth, " such as 
farming, 2*razins\ and cattle-breedina; ; flower-gar- 
dening, as well as the growing of fruits and vege- 
tables. But I told him I thought I shouldn't 
like to belong to any of those businesses, for I 
didn't know why it was, but I felt as if I had no 
taste for them. But father said, that for his part, 
he preferred a country life to a town one, and he 
thought the people in the country more honest and 
better natured than those that lived in the cities." 

" Yes, exactly what I observed," tittered the 
old one ; " and next, of course, he said there came 
the different trades that are engaged in working 
up the materials of wealth that the others are 
employed in collecting, extracting, or producing 
from the soil ?" 

" So he did," young Benjamin exclaimed ; " and 
these he explained to me might be arranged into 
three classes, according as they — as they — " 

"Why, according," the godfather prompted the 
lad, " as they are engaged in working up the raw 
materials into fabrics or stuffs, and these fairies or 
stuffs again into articles or commodities; or else 



THE START IX LIFE. 525 

according as they are employed in improving them, 
that is to say, in strengthening, finishing, or beauti- 
fying the fabrics or articles manufactured by the 
others." 

"Yes. that's it. uncle, that's it,'' went on the 
lad; ••fabric-makers, commodity-makers, and im- 
provers — they were the three great forms of handi- 
craft, father said, in all civilized countries. And 
besides these, uncle, he told me there are the 
helj .. :r those whose business it is either to 
design the work — or to make every thi \ \ for 

it — or else to assist the men while doing the work 
itself: such as architects, pattern designers, 
draughtsmen — " 

" And civil engineers, too : all of whom make it 
a business to plan the work that has to be done/' 
Uncle Ben proceeded, as he found the little fellow 
at a loss to recall the difficult details; "for these 
are the great designers of the world's handicraft : 
while the excavators, road-makers and menders, as 
well as the riggers and stowers of ships, are the 
fitters and preparers for other forms of labour; 
even as the hodmen, the wheel-drivers, the layers- 
on, the feeders, and stokers, and, indeed, all those 
lower grades of manual labourers (whose duty it is 
to act as the fetchers and carriers and attendants 
of the skilled workmen) are merely the assist- 
ants of the others." 

" Then father told me, too, uncle, ;5 the boy 
went on again in his turn, " that after the goods 
are manufactured by means of all these different 
kinds of work — : ' 

"And aids to work," suggested the other. 

t; There is an immense number of people engaged 
in what he termed distributing them inio the differ- 
ent market-, all over the world sometimes," added 
the boy; " and for this purpose, he said, there is 
the great machinery of the carrying trades" 



526 YOUNG BEXJAMIX FRANKLIN. 

"Including the merchant- seamen," broke in 
the uncle, "bargemen, boatmen and canalmen; 
the coachmen, guards and waggoners; the carriers, 
carters and trammen (there were no railways 
then) ; the truckmen, porters, messengers and 
postmen ; the dock-labourers, warehousemen and 
storekeepers, as well as the packers and the like." 

"And an equally large number engaged in 
commerce also," resumed the lad. 

" Such as ship-owners and merchants," ex- 
plained Uncle Ben; " brokers, factors, agents and 
their clerks ; wholesale dealers and travellers ; 
retail dealers and shopmen; auctioneers, town 
travellers and commission agents ; tallymen, huck- 
sters, hawkers, pedlars and packmen ; besides the 
attendants at fairs and markets." 

" Oh, isn't it wonderful," burst out the little 
fellow, " that there should be so many different 
kinds of business in the world ! Why, it would 
have taken us years to have seen all of them." 

"Ah, but we have got only half through the 
list yet, lad," urged the persistent old man. 

"Yes, I know; for father told me," proceeded 
the godson, "that over and above these, there are 
the capitalists, the employers and superintendents, who, 
though they do none of the work themselves, are 
always engaged either in aiding and providing it 
for others, or else in watching and testing the 
work done ; and these, father said, might be called 
the foster- workers of society." 

; : " Of course !" cried Uncle Ben, " the very word 
T gave him ; and a good term it is too, I flatter 
myself, for though the man of money is not 
directly one of labour's own children, he is certainly 
her foster-child, at once maintained by her, and 
maintaining her, as he himself advances in life. 
And under this class, lad, we have what are called 
* sleeping partners,' as well as the whole legion of 



THE START IN LIFE. 527 

bankers and their clerks, of bill discounters, bill 
brokers, and scriveners, mortgagees and pawn- 
brokers — and, indeed, all those whose vocation it is 
to lend, advance, or procure capital or money for 
such as stand in need of it ; while, on the other 
hand, there is the large class of work superintend- 
ents, as supervisors, overlookers, foremen, pay- 
clerks, inspectors, examiners, viewers, and so on." 

" Well, I declare, I never thought society was 
arranged in anything like the way it is," observed 
the lad. 

u Ah. ! but we haven't done yet, little Mister 
Shortsighted, I can tell you," added the old man, 
as he covered the boy's eyes with his hands to 
show him how blind he was. 

" But we must have done, uncle." remonstrated 
the lad, as he broke away from the old man ; 
" there can't be anything else, for that was all 
father went over to me." 

" Can't there indeed, Mister Clever ?" was the 
playful answer. " Well, sir, I must tell you what 
your father forgot : that there is still a large class 
that live, not by making or producing anything, 
nor yet by helping or encouraging others to do so r 
but simply by doing something for the rest of the 
world." 

" Well, I can't see how you can make that out, 
uncle," argued the boy, " for if they don't produce 
anything, as you say, I don't understand how they 
can have anything to sell." 

" Indeed, sir," answered the godfather, patting 
the boy on the cheek; "then how do you think 
doctors and clergymen, play-actors and servants, 
soldiers and watchmen, manage to live ?" 

"Ay," ejaculated Master Ben, pulling a long 
face; "and how would you describe their work, 
uncle ?" 

" Why, I should style them servitors,' 1 said the 



528 YOUNG BENJAMIN FRANKLIN. 

elder Benjamin ; " for the vocation of every one of 
them consists in rendering some service, or doing 
some good office to others in the community ; and 
as such services lie in ministering to the enter- 
tainment, the well-being, or the security of the 
public, I should class them either as the enter- 
tainers, such as actors, authors, artists, musicians, 
dancers, conjurors, and even servants — all of whom 
are engaged in rendering some temporary service to 
others ; or else as the advisers and instructors — like 
the members of the learned professions, and the 
several teachers and professors of the different 
branches of learning and science ; or else I should 
group them under the head of public guardians — a 
class which would include the ministers of State, 
the government officers, and the soldiers and 
sailors engaged in the defence of the country, as 
well as the legal authorities, and all their depend- 
ents, together with the several parish functionaries 
of the kingdom. Of these classes, the last two (the 
advisers and guardians) are occupied generally in 
rendering some permanent service, or in doing some 
lasting good office, rather than (like the enter- 
tainers) affording a mere passing gratification to 
the other members of the community. And with 
these, Ben, we come to an end of the several voca- 
tions that make up the complex machinery of civi- 
lized society." 

" Well, I declare," exclaimed the little fellow, 
" it is a tangle — such a tangle, that it seems almost 
impossible to unravel when a chap comes to think 
of it all." 

"Ay, but a little orderly arrangement, a few 
mental pigeon-holes, can soon enable us to have 
the matter at our fingers' ends, and to take a bird's- 
eye view of the whole," explained the uncle. " It 
is this mere tidying work of philosophy, as I said 
before, which is the mainstay of the comprehen- 



THE START IN LIFE. 529 

sive faculty of the mind. Thus we see now 
that the different members of society are engaged 
either in producing something directly or indi- 
rectly, or else in serving some one tempora- 
rily, or permanently; and that those who are 
concerned directly in production are occupied 
either in getting the materials, or in working them 
up into commodities, or else in improving the pro- 
ducts, or helping the workers ; whilst those who 
are indirectly concerned in the same business, are 
occupied either in distributing the goods, that is 
to say, in carrying them to their different markets, 
or in selling them to the consumers, or else in 
fostering the work itself, by providing the capital 
or superintending the labour : whereas those who 
are concerned in doing some service, rather than 
producing any thing for the community, are occu- 
pied either with entertaining, or with advising, 
and teaching, or else with protecting, and guard- 
ing the public. And this, Ben, makes up the 
entire mechanism of civilized society." 

" I see, uncle," added the boy ; " it looks a great 
deal simpler now that we go over it all more 
rapidly." 

" Well, Ben," asked his uncle, " and which of 
the wheels of this same wonderful piece of machi- 
nery are you going to work at, lad ?" 

" Why, I really don't know now, uncle, under 
which head to place the trade I've chosen," said 
young Ben, with an air of no little perplexity. 

" Well, are you going to produce anything, or to 
serve any one, Ben ? that's question number one," 
interrogated the elder Benjamin. 

" You see, uncle, I'm not going to produce any- 
thing exactly, but only to add something to a 
thing that's already made," the little man replied, 
still boggling over the difficulty. 

" Oh, then, you are going to be an improver of 

2 M 



530 YOUNG BENJAMIN FRANKLIN. 

some product after it's made, are yon ?" inquired 
the godfather. " Well, are yon going to strengthen 
it, boy ; to put the finishing touches to it, or to 
beautify it?" 

" Do you know, I don't think I'm going to do 
any one of the three. I'm merely going to add 
something to it, uncle. Now you guess what it is, 
sir," said the youth, kneeling down on the hassock 
in front of his godfather, and shaking his forefinger 
with mock authority in his face. 

The old man thought of the little fellow's vow 
that he would be an artist ; so, with a toss of his 
head, he answered, " Oh, I know — you're going to 
be a painter ; a house painter, perhaps," he added 
with a laugh. 

" No, I'm not," answered the^youth ; " I'm going 
to be a printer — a printer of books! what do you 
think of that, uncle ?" 

" Why, I'm glad to hear }^ou've chosen so sen- 
sibly, lad," the godfather made answer, as he laid 
his hand approvingly on the little fellow's head. 

" And do you know why I preferred that trade 
above all others, uncle ?" the lad asked, as" he looked 
up affectionately in the old man's eyes. 

" Let me hear your reason, Ben," said the other. 

The little fellow stretched up his hands, and 
pressed the old man's cheeks between his palms, 
as he replied, " Why, uncle, because I remem- 
bered all the nice things you told me about the 
pleasures of good books ; and I thought if I became 
a printer, it would be having a business and the 
best of all amusements too." 

" I'm glad my counsel has guided you so well, 
my child," smiled out the old good counsellor. 

" Yes, and what's more, uncle," added the kneel- 
ing boy, " now I'm at your feet, thanking you for 
all your goodness to me, I'll promise you that 
while I do my work I'll not forget my duty." 



THE LAST DAY AT HOME. 531 

The simple expression of the lad's gratitude was 
nigh unmanning the kindly natured old boy, his 
uncle, so when he had gulped down the ball that 
seemed to rise in his throat, the Puritan godfather 
said " Get up, Ben. I like no one to go upon his 
knees to his fellows ;" and when he had stood the 
lad erect before him, and made him look full in his 
face, he added, " and now give me your hand, like 
friend to friend, and promise me one thing more 
before we have done." 

The boy gazed straight into his godfather's eyes 
as he answered, " I will." 

" Promise me, sir," went on the other "that in 
after life, when any mean or savage thought crosses 
your mind, you'll think of Uncle Ben, and beat 
down the ugly impulse before it has time to ex- 
press itself in action." 

The boy merely bowed his head, and answered, 
" I do promise you this." 

And then the old man shook the youngster 
warmly by the hand for a moment; and at last start- 
ing from his seat, he darted hurriedly from the 
room, crying, " Good-night ! May God bless 
you." 



CHAPTER XXVII. 

THE LAST DAY AT HOME. 



Uncle Ben would have a feast to celebrate his 
godson's start in life. Josiah of course was as 
strong as usual against " carnal joys," and the " love 
of the flesh-pots ;" but the mother, motherlike, was 
soon won over to the gastronomic theory of boyish 
happiness (for Puritan as was her stock, she had 
still all a matron's instinctive belief in the loving- 
kindness of plum-cakes and puddings, — so long as 



532 YOUNG BENJAMIN FKANKLIN. 

they were not made too rich, she added) : so the 
united forces of wife and brother were brought 
to bear against the half-ascetic creed of the stern 
old tallow-chandler ; and even he . (though he 
had all the martyr element in his veins, and could 
have borne the stake without wincing), wanted 
hardness of nature sufficient to hold out against 
brother Ben's kindly banter about brother Josh's 
own early love of pudding, and the wife's insidious 
coaxing and motherly appeals. 

Accordingly, a day for the feast was soon fixed, 
and the thirteen members of the Franklin family, 
all duly apprised and bidden to the merry-making ; 
and in a few days afterwards the dame was again 
engaged in thumbing patches of lard over the broad 
sheet of paste that was to roof in another apple 
and pumpkin pie, almost as big as a sponging- 
bath. Then there was the like brisket of corned- 
beef wabbling away, with the dough-nuts bump- 
ing against the lid, on the hob ; and another 
turkey and pair of canvas-back ducks twirling in 
front of the huge kitchen fire, and making the 
whole house savoury with their tantalizing per- 
fume. Deborah, too, filled another gallon measure 
of dried apples and peaches out of the store closet, 
to be duly stewed for the supper; and on the dresser 
stood another bowl of curds as big as a kettle- 
drum, and another huge jar of honey to serve the 
children for dessert. 

And the day was not far advanced before the 
boys and girls, and the grown young men and 
their wives and little ones, all came swarming 
back again to the hive. Little Esther and Martha 
came first this time — one bringing a bead purse, 
and the other a knitted worsted comforter, for 
young Ben; and scarcely had they kissed the 
little fellow, and wished him every success in 
life, before Jabez and Nehemiali, the carpenter's 



THE LAST DAY AT HOME. 533 

and mason's boys, came tearing over the house, 
the former laden with the promised rabbit hutch ; 
and after them came Zachary, the shipbuilder, 
with his motherless little boy as before ; and 
John Franklin, the tallow-chandler from Ehode 
Island, and his young Quakeress wife with her 
infant in her arms : and Abiah, the sister who 
had married the trader in furs and beaver skins, 
but who, to the great disappointment of the boys, 
was now away on his travels among the Indian 
tribes ; Thomas, the eldest brother, and hereditary 
smith of the family, came too, aud Ebenezer, the 
young farmer, with his intended bride by his side, 
as well as sister Euth, the captain's wife, with 
her little brood of chicks at her heels — indeed, all 
were there, as at the previous feast, even including 
James the printer, to whom little Ben was going 
to be bound, and Uncle Ben's own son, the cutler 
— all the Franklins were there excepting poor 
Josiah the outcast. 

And the merry-making and the games were as 
hearty as ever, and when the supper was over, and 
the bowls of dame Franklin's celebrated " lambs' - 
wool " placed upon the table, Uncle Ben bade 
all present fill their mugs to the brim, and gave 
them the toast of the evening, " Health and 
success to young Benjamin Franklin, and may he 
live to be the man we wish him." 

The candle-store in Hanover Street fairly shook 
again with the volley of brothers' cheers that fol- 
lowed the sentiment ; and when silence was com- 
paratively restored, the little fellow stood up, in 
obedience to a summons from his uncle, and made 
his first speech like a man — a speech that was full 
of faith and hope for the future, and regret for the 
past — a speech that made the good old mother weep 
tears of joy, and the father shake him warmly by 
the hand, and bid him " God speed," and a speech, 



534 YOUNG BENJAMIN FRANKLIN. 

too, which set all the sisters hugging and kissing 
him, and vowing " he was their own dear Benny, 
that he was." 

And when all was quiet in the house, and Ben 
and Jabez and Nehemiah were up in their room, 
playing with Master Toby, the pet guinea-pig, as 
they prepared for bed, little Benjamin cried 
suddenly as he was taking off his shoes, " Oh ! I 
forgot, I haven't wished Uncle Ben good-night." 

So down he scampered, unshod as he was, and, 
with only his little knee-breeches and his shirt to 
cover him, burst suddenly into the old man's room. 

Uncle- Ben was on his knees beside his bed; 
and as the little fellow crept up and stooped to 
kiss him, he felt that the cheek of his best friend 
in the world was all wet with tears. 

Tears ! that the godson never forgot — not even 
when the practice of the godfather's philosophy 
had made him the first Ambassador from the 
American Eepublic. 



THE END. 



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